I came upon the flags while walking the dog one morning last summer. Dozens of pieces of fabric were strung like bunting between trees in a suburban median. They were pretty, the way anything small and colorful is — butterflies, songbirds — and they fluttered in the breeze like Tibetan prayer flags.

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       What were they?

       I walked closer and saw that stitched to the pieces of calico, poplin and chambray were white rectangles, each bearing a different name in black ink: Marqueese Alston, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, Sandra Bland — on and on, totaling more than a hundred names.

       They were the names of the dead.

       There was no explanation, no information on who put the flags there or why. I decided it didn’t matter. The flags were self-explanatory: ad hoc memorials to Black Americans who died at the hands of police.

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       I saw the flags every day. In early morning’s golden hour they were bathed in buttery light. In the winter they were dusted with snow. Ice storms froze them rigid. Fog made them appear ghostly.

       Occasionally, a string holding them up would come undone from its tree branch and the banners would be on the ground. But the next day they would be back up, a little more frayed, a little more sun-bleached.

       Then last month the old banners were gone and new ones — a little more polished, with the birth and death years of the victims and a new strand that listed mass shootings in the United States — were in their place. And last week I met the woman who created them.

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       “I thought maybe this is one way that I could make a statement,” Yoon Jung Park told me.

       She’s a 57-year-old academic with a PhD in sociology, an adjunct professor in Georgetown University’s African studies department. She and her husband, Roland Pearson, lived in Africa for nearly 20 years before moving to Silver Spring 11 years ago.

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       When the coronavirus pandemic struck, Park pulled out her pile of fabric scraps and made masks for Roland and herself and their daughter, Siana Park-Pearson, 19. Last summer was a grim season, not just because of the spreading virus but because of police violence and the protests against it.

       “Having an African American husband and a mixed-race child, it hit very close to home,” Park said.

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       She wondered what life must be like for the mothers of Black or Brown sons. She thought of the times she had told Roland not to walk outside after dark wearing his hoodie.

       “Half the time we’re kind of joking, but maybe not so much,” she said.

       Park decided there was something else she could do with those pieces of fabric.

       With the help of Siana and some of Siana’s friends from Blair High School, Park compiled a list of African Americans who had died during traffic stops, on street corners, while jogging, at barbecues, in jail cells — the people who had become household names and the ones who hadn’t.

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       Then she began to sew.

       “I would keep myself busy while watching TV at night, using up the fabric that was just lying around,” Park said.

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       When the family went on car trips, Park would sit in the passenger seat, fabric on her lap, a needle and thread in her fingers.

       It took Park several months and when she was finished she chose a stretch of median in her suburban Maryland neighborhood, stringing the flags between trees that blossom each spring. Park said that the blessings on Tibetan prayer flags cast forth their sentiments to the wind and to the world. Maybe, she thought, her flags could do the same.

       Maybe, she said, they would “make people stop for 30 seconds to just pause and think about the fact that these are human beings who are gone because of institutional violence and racism in our society. And that it continues to happen.”

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       Park thinks the banners have become part of the neighborhood. “Every single time one string has come down, someone has retied them,” she said.

       Last fall she noticed some of the flags were tattered. She decided to replace them with new ones, including the birth and death years of the victims. She added a strand calling attention to another tragic aspect of American life: the mass shootings that occur with grim regularity at our offices, schools, restaurants, movie theaters and shopping malls.

       “There are just so many names,” Park said as we stood amid the flags on a recent morning.

       Twitter: @johnkelly

       For previous columns, visit washingtonpost.com/john-kelly.