On Wednesday morning in downtown Washington, D.C., Keyonna Jones stood on her artwork and remembered the time when she and six other artists were summoned by the mayor’s office to paint a mural in the middle of the night.
“BLACK LIVES MATTER,” the mural read in bright yellow letters on a street running two city blocks, blaring the message at the White House sitting just across Lafayette Square. In June 2020, when Ms. Jones helped paint the mural, demonstrations were breaking out in cities nationwide in protest of George Floyd’s murder. The creation of Black Lives Matter Plaza was a statement of defiance from D.C.’s mayor, Muriel E. Bowser, who had clashed with President Trump, then in his first term, over the presence of federal troops in the streets of her city.
But on Tuesday evening, the mayor announced the mural was going away.
Ms. Jones said the news upset her. But, she added of the mayor in an interview, “I get where she is coming from.”
The city of Washington is in an extraordinarily vulnerable place these days. Republicans in Congress have introduced legislation that would end D.C.’s already limited power to govern itself, stripping residents of the ability to elect a mayor and city council. Mr. Trump himself has said that he supports a federal takeover of Washington, insisting to reporters that the federal government would “run it strong, run it with law and order, make it absolutely, flawlessly beautiful.” In recent days, the administration has been considering executive orders in pursuit of his vision for the city.
Potential laws and orders aside, the administration has already fired thousands of federal workers, leaving residents throughout the city without livelihoods and, according to the city’s official estimate, potentially costing Washington around $1 billion in lost revenue over the next three years.
Given all this, Ms. Bowser, a Democrat, described her decision about Black Lives Matter Plaza as a pragmatic calculation.
“We have bigger fish to fry” than a fight over the plaza, she said at a town hall on Wednesday, which was set up to provide guidance to laid-off federal workers. Ms. Bowser said that the mural was a significant part of the city’s history, particularly in the summer of 2020. But “now our focus is on making sure our residents and our economy survive,” she said.
If Mr. Trump was satisfied, he gave little sign of it. In a post on Truth Social on Wednesday night, the president said his administration had ordered the mayor to “clean up all of the unsightly homeless encampments” in the District. “If she is not capable of doing so, we will be forced to do it for her!” he wrote. He then thanked her for her efforts.
To be sure, Ms. Bowser did not say whether the decision about Black Lives Matter Plaza was in direct response to any specific actions or threats by Congress or the White House, though she acknowledged that people in the administration did not like the mural.
On Monday, U.S. Representative Andrew Clyde, a Georgia Republican who has often taken legislative aim at Washington, introduced a bill threatening to withhold millions in federal funds if the city did not repaint and rename the plaza. But the mayor said the decision had been made for some time and that she had planned to announce it later this month at a meeting on the celebrations around the country’s 250th birthday.
In a social media post on Tuesday evening, the mayor said the plaza would be redesigned as part of a citywide mural project in connection with the anniversary. But, she said on Wednesday, news media inquiries about the fate of the plaza forced her hand. The mayor’s office gave few details as to whether or when Black Lives Matter Plaza might be renamed, or how the mural itself would be removed, a process that is more complicated than a simple paint job given its inlaid bricks and other features.
At the town hall, Ms. Bowser said that she believed one executive order possibly aimed at cracking down on crime and homelessness in the District of Columbia had apparently been withdrawn, as The Washington Post had reported.
But Trump administration officials said they remained committed to addressing the president’s complaints about the District and said an executive order from the White House focused on the city could still come as soon as next week. Officials declined to elaborate on the specifics of the president’s order, saying it was still under review and that the timeline remained fluid.
“President Trump has been crystal clear that he intends to restore law and order to the nation’s capital and reinvigorate the majesty of this storied city,” Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman, said in a statement.
Ms. Bowser suggested that the risks to Washington of additional federal intervention and even a takeover were always present, given the city’s complicated status within the U.S. government. She expressed no second thoughts about her decision concerning Black Lives Matter Plaza.
“This is the threat to our city right now,” the mayor said. “We go into a budget season where our revenue was estimated to be down by a billion dollars and we still have the threat of Medicaid cuts looming. That’s what D.C. residents want me to be focused on.”
“They want us to be smart and strategic and get to the other side,” the mayor added. “And that’s my job: I’m going to navigate us to the other side.”
Ms. Bowser has mostly taken a diplomatic approach toward Mr. Trump, visiting him at Mar-a-Lago before the inauguration and pledging to work closely with him on shared priorities, like bringing federal employees back to the office.
When she characterizes her discussions with the White House about D.C., which she describes as frequent and ongoing, Ms. Bowser often emphasizes a quintessentially Trumpian goal of making D.C. “the most beautiful capital city in the world.” She has tried to make the case that some things the administration has apparently mulled, like putting a multitude of large federal buildings on the local real estate market all at once, would be counterproductive to that aesthetic vision.
The decision about Black Lives Matter Plaza was perhaps the most high-profile sign yet of the mayor’s attempted balancing act. Not everyone was sympathetic.
“I would never understand why she’s doing it,” said Angela Harrelson, an aunt of George Floyd, who lives in Minnesota. “They can make up all the excuses that they want to about this. The message they are sending is still the same: You are trying to destroy history, you are trying to erase a memory.”
At the plaza on Wednesday afternoon, as a steady rain fell, Kevin Thornton, 63, a Black man who works at a nearby hotel, asked what the mayor hoped to achieve by ceding anything to Mr. Trump.
“You can kiss the ring all day” and get nothing, he said. He believed Ms. Bowser showed strength back in 2020 when she ordered the mural painted in the first place. “I thought you got a backbone,” he said.
Still, Ms. Jones, the artist who helped paint the mural five years ago, said she understood the mayor’s difficult position, with so much at stake for the city. Ms. Jones said she was grateful to have played a part in the creation of Black Lives Matter Plaza, even if it would likely be gone soon.
“Being a Black woman, I’m kind of used to the feeling of things being taken away and being erased from our history,” Ms. Jones said. “It’s a moment in time. You cannot take it away. I think the whole world felt that moment, recognized that moment. I think they are going to feel this moment too, when it’s taken away.”
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