FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE May, 12, 2021
Contact: Black Lives Matter (BLM) DC press@dcblm.org
Washington, DC - Last summer as media outlets around the world covered mass mobilizations of people protesting the continuous murder of Black people, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser did not hesitate to take center stage. She rushed to commission the painting of the first of many Black Lives Matter Street Murals in the country and renamed the area Black Lives Matter Plaza. She exploited the righteous visceral pain and outrage that fueled grassroots uprising positioning herself as a uniquely “progressive” Black woman Mayor. Mayors Keisha Lance Bottoms of Atlanta, London Breed of San Francisco, and Lori Lightfoot of Chicago would similarly follow suit. The narrative took on a life of its own no longer centering the victims their police departments had murdered.
In our statement last summer we made no apologies for making it clear that Mayor Bowser’s mural and her attempt to make it appear to be a message to Trump was performative. We are well aware of plans for a "permanent art installation". “The mural did not stop the DC Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) from murdering Deon Kay, Karon Hylton-Brown, or Terrance Palmer. It did nothing to stop homicides, jumpouts, police terror or otherwise change the material conditions of Black people in DC. Neither will the art installation” said Anthony Lorenzo Green, a Core Organizer with BLM DC and Advisory Neighborhood Commissioner of 7C04. It is not how the performance is done, it is about it being a performance.
Instead of trying to silence the BLM movement with false promises of change coming with the confirmation of a Black Police Chief who oversaw the Gun Recovery Unit (GRU), Bowser must terminate the unit and fully ban the use of all of their racist and violent tactics throughout MPD. She must stop denying MPD’s racist stop-and-frisk program we sued her over to justify over-policing that has had no impact on violence or homicide and doesn’t remove guns off the street. Anything less is still a stunt.
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Black Lives Matter DC is a member based abolitionist organization centering Black people most at risk for state violence in DC, creating the conditions for Black Liberation through the abolition of systems and institutions of white supremacy, capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism.