The jackhammers are quiet and the mural on 16th Street, Northwest, has vanished. The District of Columbia has dismantled Black Lives Matter Plaza, the monument it erected after George Floyd’s murder in 2020, under pressure from the Trump administration and Congress.
DC’s Department of Public Works painted the original mural, which Mayor Muriel Bowser turned into what was intended to be a permanent monument the next year. The plaza’s new name was also indicated on street signs.
The mural read as an assertion of local power in the face of a Presidential administration hostile to DC’s right to rule itself. And unsurprisingly, when President Trump returned to power in January, Republicans in Congress and his administration moved to get rid of it. US Representative Andrew Clyde of Georgia introduced legislation at the beginning of March that threatened to yank funds from DC unless the mural vanished. A few days later, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy wrote a letter to Bowser that cited safety concerns about artworks “installed intentionally to draw attention to their message rather than to promote the safety and mobility of road users.”
Message received. With Trump complaining about safety and aesthetics in DC—not to mention the House GOP blowing a hole in DC’s budget that will only get fixed with Trump’s help—Bowser apparently felt she had little choice but to dismantle the mural or face reprisals up to and including the end of Home Rule. Work began on March 10. “We have bigger fish to fry than fights over what has been very important to us and to their history,” she said at a press conference on March 5. The street signs are now gone, as well.
And so the monument is gone, its absence a reminder in hardscape of how much life in the DC area has changed since Trump returned to power. Bowser has promised a redesign of the plaza in time for the United States’ 250th anniversary in 2026.
Andrew Beaujon joined Washingtonian in late 2014. He was previously with the Poynter Institute, TBD.com, and Washington City Paper. He lives in Del Ray.
