#BlackLivesMatter

So, rest in power, Black Lives Matter Plaza. Mayor Muriel Bowser has at last caved to Republican pressure and is overseeing the renovation of the stretch of Washington’s 16th Street NW leading up to the White House ahead of the US’s 250th anniversary next year.

Demolition of the plaza began Monday near Lafayette Square, where BLM protesters were cleared using tear gas in June 2020, and in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church, where an arsonist started a fire in the basement during the protest. These events sparked Bowser’s decision to create a permanent plaza there in solidarity with their cause — protesting the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis a week earlier — and in resistance to then-President Donald Trump.

Black Lives Matter Plaza, a two-block stretch at Washington that features the phrase painted in 48-foot-high letters across the asphalt, is set to get a new look— and not purely by choice.

D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser confirmed the mural will be painted over and the area renamed, with students and local artists stepping in to create new murals as part of the city’s America250 initiative.

The heroes of Black History Month are the familiar leaders of the civil-rights movement: Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, John Lewis, Ella Baker, and, of course, Martin Luther King Jr. Every February, we celebrate these men and women for championing the self-evident: racial segregation was immoral, integration a moral imperative. Law finally caught up with morality when the “separate but equal” doctrine was overturned in Brown v. Board of Education, forcing school integration.

Yet something seems off about these pieties in 2025. Against a backdrop of broad discontent with liberalism, including among black Americans increasingly drawn to Trumpism, it’s worth returning to a provocative set of questions posed by the black writer Harold Cruse in the wake of civil rights: what if separate but equal contained a good idea, a better idea than advocating for racial integration above all else? Shouldn’t black activism focus on building the capacity of black communities, rather than looking to open up opportunities for the black elite?

A Georgia mayor who claims to be “America’s first Black Lives Matter organizer elected to public office” is accused of spending $26,000 of public funds for unauthorized expenses, primarily for international travel.

I, along with millions of other people, do not doubt that Minneapolis Policeman Derek Chauvin was railroaded during his trial over the death of George Floyd.

‘I ain’t no regular singer’, declares Beyoncé on Cowboy Carter, her critically acclaimed country-and-western album, released earlier this year. ‘Now come get everythin’ you came for.’

On Christmas Day, she will perform tracks from the album during halftime of the National Football League game between her hometown team, Houston Texans, and the Baltimore Ravens. It will be broadcast live on Netflix and available to the streaming service’s 280million subscribers.

Her alleged cultural import is vastly overblown media hype.

A former US Marine is set to stand trial this week for putting a homeless man in a fatal chokehold on a New York subway train.

Daniel Penny, 25, has pleaded not guilty to charges of second-degree manslaughter and negligent homicide.

Witnesses said Jordan Neely, a 30-year-old black man, was shouting at other subway passengers and asking for money when Mr Penny, who is white, pinned him down for several minutes, eventually killing him.

Ferguson inaugurated ten years of lies about race in America.

This month marks the tenth anniversary of events that changed the trajectory of this country, and not for the better. On August 9, 2014, Darren Wilson fatally shot Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Riots erupted the next day and continued for months nationwide. Black Lives Matter exploited the mayhem it had helped cause, helping it swell into a malign global force. The activist model pioneered at Ferguson has had a lasting impact on American politics, as this year’s pro-Hamas demonstrations prove.