How Black Lives Matter Plaza in DC Came to Symbolize the Movement’s Tombstone

From Atlanta’s Vine City to D.C.’s Chocolate City, Paying Homage to SNCC’s Black Power Blueprint

After the jackhammers finally fell silent and the pickaxes were put away, after the work crews dismantled the bollards, erased the big, bumblebee-yellow letters and repaved the two city blocks within the White House’s direct line of sight, Black Lives Matter Plaza was gone.

When it was erected five years ago in 2020 during the season of upheaval that followed the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis patrolman, the Washington D.C. press corps mostly described the mural as a symbolic middle finger extended by the District’s African American Mayor, Muriel Bowser, a Democrat, to President Trump who had publicly quarreled with her and antagonized protesters.

But if the mural’s unveiling is portrayed as an act of defiance, Bowser’s decision in February to remove it can only be understood as acquiescence to the notoriously petty Trump, who returned to the White House seeking to settle old scores by ordering his Republican vassals on Capitol Hill to issue the city an ultimatum: take down the plaza or lose hundreds of millions in federal funding.

While there is a germ of truth in this narrative, it is so lacking in context that it misses the point almost entirely. First elected in 2014, Bowser exemplifies a generation of African American mayors across the country who represent the economic interests of a gentrifying, white elite and a smattering of bourgeois Blacks who want in on the deal. Far from being a reliable ally to the city’s African American working class, Bowser’s policies, almost without exception, redistribute wealth upward, from employees to their employers, tenants to their landlords and borrowers to their creditors.

The activists who poured into the streets in the summer of 2020 following Floyd’s murder wanted a commitment to shrink the Metropolitan Police Department as a means of lessening state violence against African Americans and Latinos who are disproportionately in the line of fire. What they got instead from Bowser was a “temporary tattoo,” and an increase in the police budget every year since.

The irony is that for D.C.’s Black Lives Matter activists and their comrades, Bowser’s creation of the colorful but ultimately meaningless streetscape is widely considered a cynical and jejune ploy to placate—if not frustrate—their specific, material demands for racial justice. By their lights, when Bowser gave the order to erect the plaza, she was not extending her middle finger to Trump, but to them.

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Black Republic Media is a monthly online publication that explores the afterlife of chattel slavery in America through documentary and long-form narrative journalism. Fundamentally, BRM is a critique of the white settler project from the perspective of 42 million Black people whose political and economic struggles, and acts of daily resistance remain mostly unaccounted for in American culture and yet are the cornerstones of public life in the New World.