The label from the District of Columbia comes after more than a week of protests over the death of George Floyd.
A crossing near the White House where federal law enforcement used chemical irritants and flash-bang grenades this week to clear a peaceful protest upon racial inequality has a new name: Black Lives Matter Plaza.
The protests have, in some situations, turned furious, including last weekend in the District of Columbia, where an alphabet soup of federal and local law enforcement and military forces were asked to quell bouts of unrest and restore order.
Even Though more recent protests have continued mostly peaceful, the White House has grown more fortified in past days between and attempt to keep protests away from the executive mansion. Protesters have anyway assembled near the White House every night this week in crowds numbering in the thousands.
The Trump administration has undergone a lot of objection this week for its decision to use offensive tactics on Monday to clear Lafayette Park of seemingly peaceful protesters so that the president could cross it on foot to hit a historic church where rioters had set a small fire the night before. Trump, carrying a Bible, postured briefly for photographs with members of his administration before going back to the White House, a photo break that was broadly criticized by religious administrators and a bipartisan swath of lawmakers.
On Friday, along with unveiling “Black Lives Matter Plaza,” honoring the national movement strived at fighting systemic racism and police killings of black Americans, the District also coupled up with local artists to beautify a stretch of 16th Street NW in front of the White House in giant yellow lettering carrying the group’s name.
The D.C. chapter of the Black Lives Matter global network instantly denied the plaza name and street painting as “performative.” The group blamed D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser of attempting to divert from “her active counter organizing to our demands,” which involve a decrease of the city’s police budget and the reinvestment of those funds in other community preferences.
While it’s not unusual for the city to use new ceremonial names for streets throughout the District, such treatment is generally reserved for jabs at despotic foreign governments.
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