Members of the Congressional Black Caucus will be wearing black pins with the number “1870” on them, which marks the year of the first known police killing of an unarmed and free Black person occurred in the U.S.As President Biden approaches the lectern for Tuesday’s State of the Union speech to address the country’s top issues before Congress, members of the Congressional Black Caucus and other Democrats will be making a bold statement of their own — albeit a silent one.

Many of them will be wearing black pins with the number “1870” on them, which marks the year of the first known police killing of an unarmed and free Black person occurred in the United States. The pins are a call for action on reforming the institution of policing that has killed thousands of Black people in the 153 years since.

“I’m tired of moments of silence. I’m tired of periods of mourning,” New Jersey Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman, a Democrat came up with the idea to create the pins. “I wanted to highlight that police killings of unarmed Black citizens have been in the news since 1870, and yet significant action has yet to be taken.”

Whiteside had allegedly chased Truman into an alley when at some point Truman turned to ask what he had done wrong, and the officer fatally shot him, according to an account in the Philadelphia Inquirer the following day. At trial, Whiteside claimed he had been ambushed by a crowd while he chased Truman. Whiteside was later convicted of manslaughter. That same year the country adopted the 15th Amendment, which granted Black men the right to vote.

Over a century and a half since Truman’s killing, a steady stream of Black people have been killed by law enforcement, including 1,353 since 2017, according to data from Statista, a digital insights company. In fact, Black Americans are three times as likely to be killed by police as white people are, and they account for 1 in 4 police killings despite making up just 13% of the country’s population.