WASHINGTON – Chunks of concrete streaked with bright yellow paint that just days ago boldly spelled out “Black Lives Matter” sat in piles of rubble on 16th Street as workers in hard hats and neon vests chipped away at the pavement.
A gray and blue bucket labeled “Mobil Synthetic Lubricant” rested beside a slab of concrete as a worker in jeans drilled it into fragments of pavement.
The drone of the drill on 16th Street, N.W., was so loud that an ambulance speeding down nearby K Street became barely audible, swallowed by the incessant buzzing of the machinery.
“Donald, you can’t turn your head? You don’t have to look out that window, I promise you,” Karen Byrd, a 59-year-old chef from Columbus, Ohio, said after surveying the destruction and directing her plea to the White House two blocks away.
A week after D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser announced the mural’s removal — following pressure from the Republican-controlled Congress — workers chipped away at the street. The mural, painted in 2020 after George Floyd’s killing and the tear-gassing of D.C. protesters, faded into chalky dust and murky puddles. Every minute, more of the 16-letter statement disappeared.
As the drill chewed away at the word “MATTER” — the side of the three-word message closest to the White House — Giselle Mörch, a 64-year-old from Silver Spring, Maryland, paused to capture a video. Her thoughts inevitably turned to the word, the first to be erased.
“When I was walking to work this morning and taking my photos, it was interesting because it’s like, ‘So, they don’t pick Black to destroy; they pick the word matters to destroy,’” she said. “The climate we live in, everything matters.”
Mörch had heard the street would be renamed to reflect liberty — an idea she found ironic. She said it invited the question: “Liberty, for who?”
Byrd, newly arrived from Ohio, recalled the first time she stood before the mural. The air was alive with celebration and camaraderie.
“There were so many people around, taking pictures, speakers from different churches, singing,” Byrd said. “It was a glorious time for Black people, and people of color, and white people.”
With George Floyd’s 2020 killing captured on video and broadcast everywhere, Byrd said the mural felt like proof that the cries of Black people had finally been heard. For the first time, she said she believed Black lives mattered — not just to one community.
In every photo pedestrians take of the erasure, the White House looms in the background. A street once open to celebrate, walk on, and fill cameras with snapshots was now gone. And for what, Byrd asked.
“Why can’t we just have something of our own? Byrd asked. “We shouldn’t have to fight for a couple of blocks — they have all of D.C.”
Although Byrd said she understood Bowser’s difficult political position, she said she wished it hadn’t happened in Washington, once known as “Chocolate City,” a place that has a predominantly Black population.
Two women glanced both ways before crossing the one-way lane beside the street, whispering as they knelt and slipped under the yellow caution tape. One reached out to pluck two small chunks of broken concrete with faint traces of bold yellow street paint — souvenirs small enough to fit in her luggage for the trip back to Rhode Island.
Soon, other onlookers took turns darting into the street, ducking under the caution tape to claim a piece of history.
Noticing a pattern, a construction worker stepped forward, guarding the John Deere loader truck piled with cube-shaped street debris. Instead of stopping people from grabbing chunks of the street, he began handing out individually chosen pieces to the small crowd.
Dr. Donna Huntley-Newby, a 73-year-old nurse from Providence, Rhode Island, stared out at the site, her personal scrap of the street in hand.
“In all honesty, it’s quite emotional right now,” she said. “For Black America, there’s so many pieces that have been taken away from us. And now we are destroying something that was meaningful.”
An engineer paced across the site, his dim sunglasses obscuring his gaze. But the only thing he could have been looking at was what was left of the mural.
Kris Lemoins, 42, lives in Oklahoma, just 100 miles from Tulsa, the site of the 1921 race massacre — one of the worst incidents of racial violence in U.S. history.
His grandparents and parents, born in the ‘30s and ‘50s, lived through the civil rights movement, which he described as far worse than what he’s seeing now.
“It seems with every step forward, there’s always a step back, and this is that step back,” he said. “I thought it was an organic environment for someone to come and say that ‘We matter’ to like, America. We could at least agree that we’re all Americans and that our histories…intertwine.”
A woman posing in front of the fading street with her partner told Capital News Service bluntly: “Every two steps of progress we make, the United States of America will show you they can strip that away from you.”
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