Via Twitter: Mayor Muriel Bowser
City workers have begun removing Washington DC’s iconic 50-ft-long ‘Black Lives Matter’ street mural, an emblem of the 2020 racial injustice protest movement, to avoid funding cuts.
Following Republican threats to cut the city’s transportation funding unless Black Lives Matter Plaza was renamed, DC’s Mayor Muriel Bowser has green-lit the removal of the mural, which stretches two blocks on 16th Street just north of the White House. She has said the plaza will be redesigned.
The Black Lives Matter protest movement took off nationwide in June 2020 following the murder of 46-year-old Black American man George Floyd by white police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis.
The mural was meant to be a permanent memorial to the movement, and the plaza was renamed Black Lives Matter Plaza by Bowser as a rebuke to President Trump (then in his first term). The public space was the epicentre of demonstrations in the capital, where federal troops were deployed to counter protestors.
According to the NY Post, the mural will be replaced with a new, unspecified city-sponsored mural that will be part of the ‘America 250’ mural project, inviting students and artists to contribute to the redesign of the plaza. The removal of the existing Black Lives Matter mural is expected to take six weeks.
