The rise and fall of Black Lives Matter Plaza

CNN

24-05-2025

Race & ethnicity
Donald Trump
Visual artsFacebookTweetLink
Follow
'Nobody should die like that.'
It was Starlette Thomas' first thought when she watched a bystander's video on social media of George Floyd dying under the knee of a White police officer.
And it was the spark that propelled her out of her office and into the streets of Washington, DC, where she joined the throngs in chanting three words that almost instantly galvanized into both a plea and a rallying cry:
Black Lives Matter.
In the days after the murder on Monday, May 25, 2020, along a Minneapolis road, hundreds of thousands flooded streets across the nation in protest. Most had been isolating for months as the coronavirus pandemic took hold.
But the death of yet another Black person at the hands of police seemed to shatter a dam in the American conscious.
The 7-acre green space just north of the White House, known as Lafayette Square, had been a rallying place for change for more than a century, from women's suffrage marches in 1917 to the fight for racial equality and gay rights half a century later.
And so it was where protesters gathered to mourn the death of this 46-year-old father, George Floyd.
For Thomas, standing among the thousands of Americans of all races and faiths and demanding racial equality changed the way she thought about criminal justice and her role as a pastor serving a nearby church.
It was 'this cathartic release, this need to demonstrate, to protest, to yell and to not hold the grief that this had triggered,' she said.
As the crowd chanted the names of Black lives lost to police violence – Tamir Rice, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor – it began to feel to Thomas like a prayer.
'That was a holy experience for me that is unmatched,' she said.
The daytime demonstrations were largely peaceful.
But as night fell on Washington – and other American cities – their tone changed.
After nights of clashes, then-President Donald Trump, known for issuing directives and invectives through social media, fired off a series of posts shortly before 1 a.m. on Friday, May 29, 2020.
He condemned protests in Minneapolis that had become violent.
'These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd,' he wrote before pivoting to a stark ultimatum:
'Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.'
Outside the White House that evening, people began throwing rocks. Some tried to topple police barricades. The Secret Service rushed Trump and his family to the executive mansion's bunker.
'Nobody came close to breaching the fence,' Trump posted the following day. 'If they had, they would have been greeted with the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen.'
Trump's allusions to police brutality – the very thing demonstrators were protesting – only seemed to rile them and underscore what was at stake.
It was also prescient.
Demonstrations kept swelling through the weekend. Offices and other buildings around Lafayette Square were boarded up. But it didn't stop the destruction.
The windows of Michelle Brown and Linda Neumann's tea shop by the White House were smashed and the café set on fire, they told an influential city magazine. Even so, Brown quickly took to social media to underscore her support for those peacefully demanding change:
'Before anyone puts a single word in our mouths,' she wrote: 'Black lives matter.'
'There's insurance to cover things like this,' Neumann told the magazine. 'We are both just so sad and heartbroken about what's happening in the country and how things came to this.'
Then, late Sunday night, an arsonist set fire to the basement of St. John's Church, a landmark crowning the top of Lafayette Square and often referred to as the 'presidents church' because so many have worshipped there.
The physical damage was minimal. But the flames ignited a series of events that soon would alter the landscape of the district itself.
The following day, officials in Hennepin County, Minnesota, ruled Floyd's death a homicide, codifying what many already sensed:
Floyd's life had been taken, and someone should be held accountable.
Protesters again gathered outside the White House. Only this time, they were met by police.
The law enforcement presence was subtle at first. Officers observed from the park as demonstrators waved signs and chanted, 'Hands up, don't shoot!' and 'No Justice! No Peace.'
But as the day wore on, the police presence grew. Journalists noticed.
'These protests until now have been entirely calm,' CNN correspondent Alex Marquardt told Wolf Blitzer.
'In fact, even as this escalation is happening, as these police come up to confront the protesters, we have not seen the protesters respond in any sort of way, by throwing any sort of projectiles …
'But Wolf, there's also a fear of escalation.'
Then, the mood shifted. Hundreds of National Guard troops staged near the park. A line of mounted police officers towered above the protesters and kept watch.
The White House announced Trump would make a statement in the Rose Garden.
The officers, Marquardt said, began to pull on gas masks.
In seconds, things went from peaceful to pandemonium.
Law enforcement rushed the crowds. Protesters screamed and scattered. People fell. Others took a knee before the advancing line of police.
Many retreated toward St. John's Church.
As police descended, Thomas thought of the 1965 civil rights march to Montgomery, Alabama, that saw a young activist named John Lewis beaten bloody on a bridge in Selma.
'All that was missing was a water hose and some dogs,' she recalled. 'We're marching to advance a cause – to say you can't just kill people without due process – and you're pushing us back with violence.'
Tear gas canisters cracked like thunder, and flash bangs echoed across White House lawns. Somehow, the Rose Garden maintained a relative tranquility, and from it, Trump spoke to the American people.
'I will fight to protect you. I am your president of law and order and an ally of all peaceful protesters,' he said as helicopters whirred.
Trump called on mayors and governors across the country to 'dominate the streets' and 'establish an overwhelming law enforcement presence until the violence has been quelled.'
Then, he left the stage and made his way across the park.
Standing in front of the boarded-up St. John's Church, the president posed with a Bible, holding it in the air.
'We have a great country,' he told reporters.
It wasn't long before pundits launched debates over Trump's sacred prop, critics argued about the use of active-duty military against Americans exercising First Amendment rights and politicians lined up to assign blame.
In the office of the mayor of Washington, DC, the response was quieter as officials moved into action to make clear to the world – and the president living down the street – the city's undisputed stance on the moral moment gripping the nation.
First, they called Keyonna Jones.
An artist born and raised in Southeast DC, Jones – like many Americans – had been struggling to reconcile her own struggles in the pandemic with the injustice of Floyd's death, she said.
All the same, she answered the phone. And in less than 24 hours, she was across town on 16th Street NW.
With an army of volunteers, friends, neighbors and municipal workers, Jones began to emblazon the two blocks leading directly to the White House with 50-foot letters that spelled out the moment's words of empowerment so indelibly, they could be seen from space:
On June 5 – just 11 days after Floyd took his last breath – the district officially unveiled Black Lives Matter Plaza. The date happened to coincide with the birthday of Breonna Taylor, the Black American whose life had been cut tragically short that March in an encounter with police.
'We know what's going on in our country,' Mayor Muriel Bowser said. 'We had the opportunity to send that message loud and clear on a very important street in our city … And that message is to the American people that Black Lives Matter, that Black humanity matters, and we as a city raise that up as part of our values.'
Other cities followed suit. In Montgomery, Alabama, the phrase marked the spot where enslaved people once were auctioned. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, the same kind of yellow letters were painted along Greenwood Avenue in homage to the lives stolen in the 1921 Race Massacre. New York commissioned a mural along 5th Avenue, just outside Trump Tower. More murals appeared in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom.
They often were spurned. Many were vandalized. And some people, including Trump, saw them as divisive. He called Manhattan's mural a 'symbol of hate.'
Even some within the Black Lives Matter movement declared the murals 'performative,' an attempt by public officials to absolve themselves of the immensely hard work of rooting out systemic racism.
'I think art is part of activism,' countered Jones, the artist. 'It's a universal language – people will see it, people will feel it and it's starting a conversation that may not have happened.'
In its early days, John Lewis – the bloodied young activist who'd become a senior statesman representing Georgia in the US Congress – walked along DC's BLM Plaza. The 80-year-old was battling pancreatic cancer, but he was determined to see the mural in person, a spokesperson said.
Forty days later, he died.
The district the following year spent millions making the mural a permanent installation, replacing traditional asphalt with colored pavers to spell out its eponymous phrase. The goal, the mayor said, was to transform 'the mural into a monument.'
In its quieter moments, the public art acted as a beacon, calling on Americans – together – to mourn, celebrate, argue, strategize and reflect on the ongoing fight against racism in the United States and the nation's commitment to equality.
And, sure enough, it outlasted the pandemic. And the trial and conviction of Floyd's murderer. And the entire Biden administration. And Trump's return this year to the White House.
Then, after nearly five years of the plaza hosting moments both horrifying and holy, a Republican congressman from Georgia introduced a bill that would have withheld federal funding from Washington, DC, unless the mural was erased.
Facing political pressure unlikely to soon relent, Bowser's office ultimately announced the artwork – with the plaza's official designation – would be removed.
On a Sunday this March, dozens of visitors paused at the intersection of 16th and I Streets NW to take final photos before construction crews pulverized Black Lives Matter Plaza into dust and piles of rock.
'To me, this is part of our history,' one man told CNN in those final days. 'It's showing that we are trying to make progress and then they're gonna tear it down? That doesn't make sense.'
As Thomas watched the construction crews and excavators, she felt gutted and angry. In the nearly five years since Floyd's death, she'd opted against preaching from the pulpit and instead ministered directly to activists and advocates leading protest movements across the country.
Witnessing the ordered destruction, she wondered: 'Are you thinking if you dig this up … you can just erase what we've done here?'
Then, in full view of the workers, Thomas picked up a chunk of the mural and walked away.
It was 'an act of defiance, an act of resistance,' she said. 'You can't erase memory. You can't erase conviction.'
Jones felt much the same way. Five years after her artwork drew global attention, the United States has seemingly returned to its status quo, she said, with conversations about – and, more importantly, actions toward – racial equality fading again into the background.
Still, the artist said, her father recently reminded her of a speech by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, the civil rights leader who rushed to but could not save a dying Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
In the speech, Jackson invoked the biblical boy David who fells the giant Goliath and encouraged Americans to continue to fight systems of injustice and not to be brought down by the 'margin of despair.'
'We have to recognize that we're Davids,' Jones said. 'There are rocks laying around that we can use to defeat the system.'
We just have to pick them up.
Visual editors Austin Steele and Maya Blackstone and story editor Michelle Krupa contributed to this report.