Wednesday will be the second anniversary of the lurid street murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. The killings of Black people had become almost banal in their incessancy and redundancy, but something about this one captured during an advancing pandemic that had forced people apart and inside, watching the world through windows and screens drew thousands of people out into the streets, where boarded-up storefronts produced the tempting tableau of a country strewn with canvases.
Some saw in the uprising the potential for revolution. They talked about the protests in the lofty language of a racial reckoning, an inflection point, a fresh start on Americas path to absolution from its original sin.
But flashes of guilt, outrage and shame often stir fleeting fealties, and the heavy gravitational pull of racial privileges and power can quickly draw mercurial allies back into the refuge of the status quo.
Some good came of the protests, to be sure. Some states and local municipalities passed or instituted police reforms. Money poured into Black Lives Matter, as well as other racial justice organizations and Black institutions. Individuals began personal journeys to become more egalitarian and more actively antiracist. And artists produced hundreds of murals and thousands of pieces of other street art that, for a time, transformed this country.
In the end, transformative national change proved to be an illusion. Inflation, a war in Ukraine, public safety, abortion and even a baby formula crisis have overtaken the zeitgeist. Support for Black Lives Matter has diminished. Federal police reform and federal voter protection both failed to pass the Senate. And the founders of Black Lives Matter have been drawn into controversies about how they handled its money.
Ive learned not to expect much from America; it has a deep capacity for change but a shallow desire for it. I have embraced the wise desire not to be betrayed by too much hoping, as James Baldwin put it. But I worry about young people in all of this. It is their faith thats most vulnerable to damage. They were the ones who most believed that change was not only possible but imminent, only to have America retreat and retrench.
Now not only are their allies reversing course on issues like police reform; the country is also facing a full backlash toward protest itself. Dozens of states have passed laws restricting the right to protest (just this week, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida barred citizens from protesting outside private homes), and more than a dozen have now criminalized teaching full and accurate racial history.
The Great Erasure is underway, not so much an attempt to erase the uprising itself as an attempt to blunt its effects.
There is no example of this erasure more striking than the continual destruction, removal or slow vanishing of much of the street art produced in the wake of Floyds killing.
According to a database compiled by three professors at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota Heather Shirey, David Todd Lawrence and Paul Lorah there were once approximately 2,700 murals, graffiti, stickers, posters affixed to surfaces and light projections created in response to Floyds killing, mostly in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul. Shirey and Lawrence called it the largest proliferation of street art around one idea or issue or event in history. But many of those pieces have disappeared, sometimes because of exposure to traffic or the elements and sometimes because of deliberate attempts to erase them. Business owners quietly removed the graffitied planks from their storefronts. Some of the murals have been defaced.
For this project, my colleagues and I looked at 115 murals created after Floyds death and tried to determine how many had been maintained. (It is not a comprehensive list, although it is hard to imagine any such list could be.) Only 37 were fully intact. In cities from Oklahoma to California, few vestiges remain of what were once vibrant murals, painted on asphalt and walls.
In 2021, six police officers sued Palo Alto, Calif., because it had commissioned this mural, which included aportrait of Joanne Chesimard, a former member of the Black Liberation Army convicted of killing a state trooper in1973. The lawsuit was dismissed, but by that point,the city had already removed the mural.
This mural, designed by Avrion Jackson, was one of six that an army of some 1,000 volunteers paintedaround Kansas City in 2020. Last fall, the organizers said they planned to raise funds to restore the murals, but work on this one has not yet begun.
In spring 2020, city officials teamed up with local organizations to commission variousartists to design and paint each letter of this eclectic colorful mural. The city reopened the street to traffic that fall, and the paint has since worn away.
When this mural first appeared on Fulton Street in June 2020, the districts council member said he would seek to turn the street into a permanent pedestrian plaza. But it soon opened to traffic, which erased the lettering.
Over the past two months, I talked to art historians, museum directors and curators, activists and artists who had created murals. The picture that emerges is of a group determined to preserve as much of the art as possible while understanding that it cant all be saved, and an acknowledgement of the inherent, ephemeral nature of street art. This art was created in a moment, for a moment. Permanence was often not its central consideration. But to lose it would be to lose a cultural record of the time, a record of the profound significance and magnitude of what transpired: A generation of young people and young artists found their voice and used it, creating an arts movement that sits in the canon alongside the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 70s and the Harlem Renaissance. You might even say it mirrors on an enormous scale the Wall of Respect mural first painted in 1967 by the Visual Arts Workshop of the Organization of Black American Culture in Chicago.
What may have been different about this movement was the outlook of the generation that created it. Aaron Bryant, curator of photography, visual anthropology and contemporary history at the Smithsonians National Museum of African American History and Culture, described it to me as a sense of entitlement. These activists and artists believe they have an absolute right, and even a responsibility, to express themselves, he told me. They arent necessarily a generation that was raised to be silent.
The art produced during and after the uprising was powerful, emotional and energetic, like a lightning storm. But like lightning, the illuminated contours of the way it split the sky soon dimmed and vanished.
The art tapped into something and provided a language for it. As Franklin Sirmans, director of the Prez Art Museum Miami, put it, Some of the best art is created under situations of not only duress but of immediate response, and that is part and parcel with this sense of collective identity that I think many of us felt in that moment, and to see it visualized was really heartening.
For me, it was transcendent. It brought a fresh, abounding energy to a standing tradition.
Murals as instruments of memorial have long been a feature of Black grief and remembrance. They are what Amaka Okechukwu, assistant professor of sociology and anthropology at George Mason University, so eloquently describes as gravestone murals or wake work haunting the urban spaces where Black lives have been lost.
By no means are these murals the expression solely of African Americans. They can be found in many communities and in many cultures around the world, where the tradition of producing them is centuries old.
But in a way, Floyds murder globalized gravestone murals in service of a singular subject. Perhaps the most iconic of these murals were thoses with the words Black Lives Matter written in large block letters down the middle of streets. The first was painted by the District of Columbia and was so large that it was legible on satellite images.
People like Sarah Lewis, associate professor of history of art and architecture and African and African American studies at Harvard University, saw it as a powerful testament symbolizing the precarity of black life in open terrain. But activists soon pointed out that the politicians who supported the art often resisted policies designed to rectify the historic injustices Black Lives Matter had highlighted. When the District of Columbia painted its mural, the local Black Lives Matter chapter called it a performative distraction from real policy changes designed to appease white liberals while ignoring our demands. Mayor Muriel Bowser was on the wrong side of history, they said. Black Lives Matter means defund the police.
These tensions stretched beyond Washington.
In Minneapolis, at the intersection where Floyd was murdered now called George Floyd Square the George Floyd Global Memorial project has taken on the Herculean task of preserving all protest objects, items the group calls offerings, including art and murals, in the square. So far it has collected over 5,000 artifacts, preserved them with the help of art conservators and stored them in cardboard boxes in a small room in a community theater. The group has ambitions to one day build a museum to house it all. Some of the murals in George Floyd Square were being repainted when I visited this month, ahead of the observances of the second anniversary of Floyds murder. New ones have been added featuring other Black people killed elsewhere, some lost to community violence rather than state violence.
This level of ambition makes Minneapolis both the epicenter of the preservation efforts and an anomaly. Governments in cities across the country, like Tulsa, Okla. and Redwood City, Calif., have erased the murals, reflecting the reality that many lacked the true, sustained commitment to Black lives.
Activists painted this mural on what was once "Black Wall Street," the wealthy community ravaged in Tulsa's 1921 race massacre. City officials later removed themural because it was never officially approved, but before they did, protesters erected paper tombstones on the siteto memorialize Black lives lost to violence.
A married couple worked with volunteers to paint this mural on the fence outside their home in 2020. It was painted over the following year to comply with city ordinances that prohibit fences from being more than one color or from displaying words, pictures or signs.
Further complicating the preservation efforts is the degree to which these pieces of art were politicalized from the moment of their creation: Murals were going up as Confederate monuments in cities like Montgomery, Ala., continued to come down. It fueled the fears held by white supremacists that white people and white culture would eventually be superseded.
In their zero-sum worldview, BLMs pro-Blackness was inherently anti-white. President Donald Trump called a Black Lives Matter mural to be painted in front of Trump Tower in New York City a symbol of hate. Historical revisionists held fast to the lie that Confederate monuments were about history, rather than racism. The fight was over which art representing which points of view was more deserving of public display.
Its perhaps also no coincidence that much of the artwork created after Floyds death is vanishing as the public embrace of the Black Lives Matter movement is waning. Polls last year by the Pew Research Center found that support for Black Lives Matter, which peaked in the immediate aftermath of George Floyds death, had fallen back to its 2017 levels, pre-George Floyd. Black support had remained high; it was the support among white people that fell.
Activists chafe at the notion that the BLM movement itself is waning.
Every off year we write Black Lives Matters obituary, and we eulogize it and we talk about the waning Black Lives Matter Movement, Frank Leon Roberts, creator of the Black Lives Matter Syllabus, a public curriculum for teaching BLM in classrooms and communities, and newly appointed assistant professor of English and Black studies at Amherst College, told me.
The movement actually is not waning, he said. The movement from its inception has operated in waves. He predicts that there will inevitably be another heinous event of police violence which will once again incite something in the people, and then well be having this same conversation.
But police killings have continued unabated. In fact, last year saw a record number of police shootings, the most since The Washington Post began keeping count in 2015. The police killed 1,055 people across the country in 2021. And yet, there were no nationwide protests.
In my life I have arrived at the conclusion that real liberation equity, safety and the pursuit of happiness is not rooted in feelings and personal evolutions. Only a change in the parameters of power political, economic and cultural, who has it and who gets to exercise it, who is benefited by it and who is harmed by it can transform this country.
Passions flare and subside; power endures. Like the art, broad-based, transracial interest and energy to support the Black Lives Matter movement are fading. I mourn the loss of that energy, but I also mourn the loss of the movements art from public space. In the streets it was both declaration and confrontation, brazen and assertive. It was forcefully in your face.
Now, even among the artifacts that can be or have been saved, the context will change from the urgency of in-situ to the sterility of institutions or the impersonal distance of digital space.
The art that once shouted and demanded and documented the movement is being culled and reduced to the dulcet-toned advocacy of a few heroic curators.
Read the original:
Opinion | George Floyd and the Fading Signs of Black Lives Matter - The New York Times
- Cincinnati Artist Collective Creates Sculptural Series that Spells Out Black Lives Matter - Cincinnati CityBeat - May 5th, 2024 [May 5th, 2024]
- Police investigate decapitated deer heads found near Biden and Black Lives Matter signs - Washington Examiner - May 5th, 2024 [May 5th, 2024]
- Activist actor Kendrick Sampson cleared for trial against LAPD over Black Lives Matter protest - Courthouse News Service - April 2nd, 2024 [April 2nd, 2024]
- How Black Lives Matter is destroying public education - Washington Times - March 6th, 2024 [March 6th, 2024]
- Can Employers Ban Workers From Wearing Black Lives Matter Insignia To Protest Discrimination At Work? - Employee ... - Mondaq News Alerts - March 6th, 2024 [March 6th, 2024]
- City seeks to avoid trial over Black Lives Matter mural - Palo Alto Online - March 6th, 2024 [March 6th, 2024]
- NLRB: 'Black Lives Matter' insignia allowed New England Biz Law Update - New England Biz Law Update - March 6th, 2024 [March 6th, 2024]
- New research details negative consumer impacts of BLM support on major companies and brands - Phys.org - March 6th, 2024 [March 6th, 2024]
- Photos of Trump with His 'Black Supporters' Are Everywhere ... Can You Tell They're All Fake? - The Root - March 6th, 2024 [March 6th, 2024]
- Home Depot Barred Employee from Wearing 'Black Lives Matter' on Uniform. Did It Break the Law? - SHRM - February 29th, 2024 [February 29th, 2024]
- NLRB says Home Depot broke law in banning reference to 'Black Lives Matter' from worker's apron - The Atlanta Journal Constitution - February 29th, 2024 [February 29th, 2024]
- Church of England tells parishes to set up 'race action plan' put forward by pro-BLM bishop - The Telegraph - February 29th, 2024 [February 29th, 2024]
- The designer of the Black Disabled Lives Matter symbol on zines, parenting and solidarity - The 19th* - February 29th, 2024 [February 29th, 2024]
- NLRB rules Home Depot violated the law - HR Brew - February 29th, 2024 [February 29th, 2024]
- It's Protected: NLRB Finds Black Lives Matter Insignia on Employee Uniform Constitutes Protected Activity Under ... - Labor Relations Update - February 29th, 2024 [February 29th, 2024]
- DC Seeks $401 Million To Save Black Lives Matter Plaza Area - The New York Sun - February 29th, 2024 [February 29th, 2024]
- BLM Coloring Book Teaches Elementary Students the Nuclear Family is Racist - Daily Citizen - February 29th, 2024 [February 29th, 2024]
- BLM co-founder slams Taylor Swift fans as 'racists' and Travis Kelce-led Chiefs winning the Super Bowl as a 'r - Daily Mail - February 29th, 2024 [February 29th, 2024]
- New Ruling Says Home Depot Broke The Law When It Barred Workers From Wearing BLM Logos On Uniforms - Essence - February 29th, 2024 [February 29th, 2024]
- Home Depot Is Ordered to Reinstate Worker Who Quit Over 'BLM' Logo - The New York Times - February 22nd, 2024 [February 22nd, 2024]
- How parents talked about Black Lives Matter differed by race, UW study finds - The Seattle Times - February 22nd, 2024 [February 22nd, 2024]
- 'You have Black Lives Matter...all lives matter' says community nurse in Buffalo about making change - WKBW 7 News Buffalo - February 22nd, 2024 [February 22nd, 2024]
- BLM movement's social justice politics and 'queer, trans-affirming' lessons delivered to kids as young as 5 in NYC school - New York Post - February 22nd, 2024 [February 22nd, 2024]
- AAS 290 examines social media and BLM movement - The Michigan Daily - February 22nd, 2024 [February 22nd, 2024]
- Home Depot employee's rights violated in firing over 'BLM' drawn on apron: labor board - Fox Business - February 22nd, 2024 [February 22nd, 2024]
- Saratoga Black Lives Matter organizers respond to AG probe - Spectrum News - February 22nd, 2024 [February 22nd, 2024]
- Church officials call for community unity in wake of 'Black Lives Matter' flag thefts - Woburn Daily Times - February 22nd, 2024 [February 22nd, 2024]
- Letter to the editor: Black Lives Matter - Pierce County Journal - February 22nd, 2024 [February 22nd, 2024]
- Study: How parents talked about Black Lives Matter differed by race - Yahoo News - February 22nd, 2024 [February 22nd, 2024]
- The Summer of 2020: George Floyd and the Resurgence of the Black Lives Matter Movement - WREG NewsChannel 3 - February 22nd, 2024 [February 22nd, 2024]
- AG: Saratoga Springs BLM activist arrests violated rights - The Daily Gazette - February 22nd, 2024 [February 22nd, 2024]
- Labor board: Home Depot violated labor law by firing an employee who drew 'BLM' on work apron - The Atlanta Journal Constitution - February 22nd, 2024 [February 22nd, 2024]
- Statue of slave trader Edward Colston will be permanently kept at a Bristol museum nearly four years after it - Daily Mail - February 22nd, 2024 [February 22nd, 2024]
- UW study: How parents talked about Black Lives Matter differed by race - Herald Palladium - February 20th, 2024 [February 20th, 2024]
- A gunman killed and injured protesters at a BLM march. Why did police blame the victims? - The Guardian US - February 20th, 2024 [February 20th, 2024]
- BLM has reshaped how we think of Palestine - Middle East Institute - February 20th, 2024 [February 20th, 2024]
- Texas DA blasts governor's move to pardon man convicted of murder of BLM protester - Dayton 24/7 Now - February 20th, 2024 [February 20th, 2024]
- Black Lives Matter PAC Spent Most Of Its Money In 2023 Paying Its Own Treasurer For 'Consulting' - Daily Caller - February 16th, 2024 [February 16th, 2024]
- How parents talked with kids about Black Lives Matter differed by race - Futurity: Research News - February 16th, 2024 [February 16th, 2024]
- Vermont Conversation: What is happening to really ensure that Black lives matter? - VTDigger - February 16th, 2024 [February 16th, 2024]
- Abbott-Prompted Daniel Perry Pardon Review Underway Following Conviction for BLM Protester's Murder - The Texan - February 16th, 2024 [February 16th, 2024]
- Black Lives Matter flag raised at US Consulate - The Daily Herald - February 1st, 2024 [February 1st, 2024]
- Seattle pays off 'fiery but mostly peaceful' Black Lives Matter protestors in 2020 riot case: Rising - The Hill - February 1st, 2024 [February 1st, 2024]
- LAPD Raided Home Of Black Lives Matter Attorney And Took Unlawful Photos, Raising Concerns Of A Harassment ... - Essence - February 1st, 2024 [February 1st, 2024]
- Issa Rae says Black stories are 'less of a priority' for TV bosses after two of her shows are axed - despite s - Daily Mail - February 1st, 2024 [February 1st, 2024]
- 'Watchmen' Creator Alan Moore Donates Movie and TV Royalties to Black Lives Matter - The Mary Sue - September 21st, 2023 [September 21st, 2023]
- Book Review: Blood in the Machine, by Brian Merchant - The New York Times - September 21st, 2023 [September 21st, 2023]
- Uninvited and Unaccountable: How CBP Policed George Floyd ... - The Intercept - September 21st, 2023 [September 21st, 2023]
- Opinion | Why More Countries Are Adopting Feminist Foreign Policies - The New York Times - September 21st, 2023 [September 21st, 2023]
- How 'Swagger' Raised Its Game - The New York Times - June 28th, 2023 [June 28th, 2023]
- Is a Dukes of Hazzard reboot coming to Netflix? - Dexerto - June 28th, 2023 [June 28th, 2023]
- Why Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing Still Matters - MovieWeb - June 28th, 2023 [June 28th, 2023]
- The Fatal Tension at the Heart of Wokeism - TIME - June 28th, 2023 [June 28th, 2023]
- Pat Robertson, broadcaster who helped make religion central to ... - The Associated Press - June 10th, 2023 [June 10th, 2023]
- Blackness and Ethnic Representation in Broadway Theater - MetroFocus - June 10th, 2023 [June 10th, 2023]
- Rhode Island Gov. McKee Calling on Textbook Companies to Resist ... - The 74 - June 10th, 2023 [June 10th, 2023]
- New Black Lives Matter tax documents show foundation is tightening its belt, has $30M in assets - The Associated Press - May 30th, 2023 [May 30th, 2023]
- New Black Lives Matter tax documents show foundation is tightening its belt, has $30M in assets - Yahoo! Voices - May 30th, 2023 [May 30th, 2023]
- Study on Black Lives Matter protests provides insight into the link between coalitional affiliation and moral elevation - PsyPost - May 30th, 2023 [May 30th, 2023]
- Opinion | America Has Become Both More and Less Dangerous Since Black Lives Matter - The New York Times - May 18th, 2023 [May 18th, 2023]
- David Starkey in bizarre claim that left-wing wants to replace Holocaust with BLM - The Independent - May 18th, 2023 [May 18th, 2023]
- Black Lives Matter activist accused of owing the BFI 200,000 'spun web of lies' over other debtee - Daily Mail - May 18th, 2023 [May 18th, 2023]
- David Starkey says activists including Black Lives Matter are 'trying to destroy white culture' - Daily Mail - May 18th, 2023 [May 18th, 2023]
- I'm a Couples Therapist. Something New Is Happening in ... - The New York Times - May 18th, 2023 [May 18th, 2023]
- Countering organized violence in the United States - Brookings Institution - May 18th, 2023 [May 18th, 2023]
- Trio suspected of vandalizing Black Lives Matter banner on Susquehanna University campus - Sunbury Daily Item - March 11th, 2023 [March 11th, 2023]
- Too pretty to be Aboriginal: Meet the model who wants to abolish our beauty paradigm - Sydney Morning Herald - March 11th, 2023 [March 11th, 2023]
- New York City Said It Will Pay $21,500 Each To Protesters Who Were Kettled And Beaten By Police During Black Lives Matter Demonstrations - BuzzFeed... - March 4th, 2023 [March 4th, 2023]
- Dad of white boy forced to his knees and to say Black Lives Matter speaks out speaks out - Daily Mail - March 4th, 2023 [March 4th, 2023]
- Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action kicks off for thousands of U.S. schools - Fox News - February 7th, 2023 [February 7th, 2023]
- Barbara Broccoli & Phoebe Waller-Bridge Among 100 To Pen UK Government Letter Over Gross Violations Of Human And Womens Rights In Iran - Deadline - January 23rd, 2023 [January 23rd, 2023]
- The Agenda of Black Lives Matter Is Far Different From the Slogan - January 19th, 2023 [January 19th, 2023]
- Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History - January 19th, 2023 [January 19th, 2023]
- After Raising $90 Million in 2020, Black Lives Matter Has $42 Million ... - January 19th, 2023 [January 19th, 2023]
- Mich. man who targeted Black Lives Matter supporters pleads guilty to ... - December 28th, 2022 [December 28th, 2022]
- I think they just saw a black girl: Author accuses bottle shop of racially profiling 12-year-old daughter - The Age - December 28th, 2022 [December 28th, 2022]
- Biden Admin to Drop Half a Million on Artificial Intelligence That Detects Microaggressions on Social Media - Washington Free Beacon - December 23rd, 2022 [December 23rd, 2022]
- Black Lives Matter's Alicia Garza: Leadership today doesn't look like ... - December 21st, 2022 [December 21st, 2022]
- Black Lives Matter: How far has the movement come? - December 21st, 2022 [December 21st, 2022]
- BLM has left Black Americans worse off since the movement began ... - December 18th, 2022 [December 18th, 2022]