America, Cowering: What Civil Rights Law Has Become

By mid-June, Black Lives Matter posters hung in every smashable storefront window on Connecticut Avenue between Dupont Circle and Lafayette Square, the public park in front of the White House. Washington, D.C., mayor Muriel Bowser had barred automobile traffic from a two-block stretch of nearby 16th Street and renamed it Black Lives Matter Plaza. Municipal street crews stenciled “BLACK LIVES MATTER” onto the pavement in yellow letters six lanes high. The street became a pit stop for demonstrators and sympathizers who milled through Lafayette Square in the heat, with their t-shirts and their handmade signs, their megaphones and (later) their ropes for pulling down statues.