In the summer of 2020, I left my home in Bowie, Maryland, and traveled to Washington, D.C. We were far from having a cure for the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), with the first human case being reported in December of 2019. But George Floyd had been viciously murdered by a police officer during his arrest in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 25.
The store clerk suspected Floyd of using a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill to make a purchase, so he called the police. What followed would spark the largest protest movement in the nation’s history.
The initial report was that Derek Chauvin knelt on Floyd’s neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, resulting in Floyd’s untimely and gruesome death. Later, we learned from body camera footage that Floyd was face down and handcuffed with Chauvin’s knee on his neck for 9 minutes and 29 seconds.
At 4 minutes and 45 seconds, Floyd cried out for help and flailed due to a seizure. Even though Floyd was nonresponsive for 3 minutes and 51 seconds, Chauvin didn’t move.
So, amid a global pandemic, people around the world did move. Because Floyd’s life mattered and was worth more than the twenty-dollar bill that should have had Harriet Tubman’s face on it.
Last Monday, I felt the same compulsion to leave my home and travel to Washington, D.C. Friends later reminded me that it was “Harriet Tubman Day,” so it all makes sense.
I parked and walked to the familiar street renamed “Black Lives Matter Plaza” five years ago until the street mural was demolished with jackhammers. Apparently, just painting over the 35-foot-tall and 48-foot-wide mural, complete with yellow capital letters that read “BLACK LIVES MATTER” on 16 Street NW, is not enough.
The reason? Either the mural near the White House or the city’s federal funding had to go. What had been a rallying point for activists, a marker for resistance and a sacred space to celebrate bodies racialized as black, will now be replaced.
U.S. Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga. introduced legislation that gave D.C.’s leaders an ultimatum. The bill also called for it to be re-named from Black Lives Matter Plaza to Liberty Plaza. This is erasure.
The mural was created after federal officers attacked D.C. protesters with tear gas in Lafayette Square. They were peaceful protests. I know because I was there.
I left 30 minutes before Donald Trump called for the area to be cleared for his controversial photo-op. The next morning, I returned and held space on the church’s steps while persons recreated the image of him holding the Bible upside down at St. John’s Church.
“The mural inspired millions of people and helped our city through a very painful period, but now we can’t afford to be distracted by meaningless congressional interference,” D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser wrote in a statement. I went to Black Lives Matter Plaza on Monday to make another: We will not be moved.
As the ground trembled, repulsed by the tools used to undermine the work and witness of the foot soldiers who resisted police brutality and state-sanctioned violence, I paced back and forth. I couldn’t believe it was happening.
A mix of emotions, I settled on sadness but left with a fresh resolve. More than brick and mortar, you cannot stop a movement. No matter how far the construction workers drilled down, I won’t walk back my commitment to put my body on the line for the sake of the community called beloved. Because the ground still speaks and continues to call me to bear witness.
Breaking up this ground doesn’t break the human spirit. Instead, it tills it for new expressions of liberation. This is just a new beginning.
I left that day with a big chunk of the mural in hand, part concrete block and part of the “S” in MATTERS. A huge symbol of somebodiness, I may not be able to visit it, but now I carry it with me.
“‘Mama, I love you!’ he screamed from the pavement, where his cries of ‘I can’t breathe’ were met with an indifference as deadly as hate,” Robert Smalls and Toluse Olorunnipa wrote in “His Name Is George Floyd: One Man’s Life and the Struggle for Racial Justice.” “‘Reese, I love you!’ he yelled, a reference to his friend Maurice Hall, who was with him when he was handcuffed that Memorial Day evening.”
The writers continued, ‘Tell my kids I love them!’” These words marked the end of a life in which Floyd repeatedly found his dreams diminished, deferred, and derailed—in no small part because of the color of his skin.”
Still, George Floyd remains larger than life. The government could remove every mural and monument, but the ground would still speak, beckoning us to say his name: George Perry Floyd Jr.
- About the Author
- Latest Posts
Director of The Raceless Gospel Initiative, an associate editor, host of the Good Faith Media podcast, “The Raceless Gospel” and author of Take Me to the Water: The Raceless Gospel as Baptismal Pedagogy for a Desegregated Church.
