It was a year ago this week that the Black Lives Matter signs came down from the Lafayette Park fence where they had garnered national attention as a rallying point for protests for nearly a year. The park, across the street from the White House, had been fenced off to keep protesters at a distance. Protestors, in turn, made artwork of the fence.
“I Can’t Breathe.” “Matter is the Minimum.” “Say Their Names.” “Fight the Power.”
There were hundreds of signs, protesting the police killings of George Floyd and others, as well as the nation’s long history of racial injustice. Some signs lasted days. Some lasted months. Some were torn down by counter-protestors and replaced. When volunteers removed the signs on Jan. 30, 2021, there were some 800 of them. A number of those have since been collected by the Library and Howard University. A small selection was exhibited in Tulsa, Oklahoma, last year as part of the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. A digitization project is underway at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore and the D.C. Public Library that will ultimately make them all available online.
You can see 33 of them now on the Library’s website. Read and see more from the “Protest Preserved: Signs from D.C.’s Black Lives Matter Memorial Fence” LoC Blog post here.