The Erasure of Black Lives Matter Plaza: What Removal of Our Stories Reveal
From the top of a building, Kanon Kennedy, of Washington, looks down at the Black Lives Matter mural as demolition begins, Monday, March 10, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)
Erin Dooley serves as co-founder of BLK South. With over twenty years of experience in nonprofit leadership, pastoral ministry, and strategic communications, Erin has worked extensively in faith-based and community-driven initiatives. She has served as a Co-Pastor at Kaleo Phoenix Church, Clergy Engagement & Communications Manager at Corazón, and a brand strategist and content producer. Currently pursuing a Master of Community Leadership at Eden Theological Seminary (graduating spring 2026), she is a scholar in the making, passionate about the intersection of theology, human behavior, and social transformation. Erin’s work focuses on creating spaces that cultivate healing, belonging, and liberation, particularly for historically marginalized communities. Learn More
It feels like they are sending a message. The threat of Republican budget cuts has forced a form of symbolic violence—a stripping away of identity—as they remove “BLACK LIVES” from the concrete and rename the Plaza, ensuring that no public marker in Washington affirms that we, indeed, MATTER.
But what does that mean—removing us? That is an impossible thing to do. To remove us, to erase us.
Erasure is a paradox. Though it stems from a desire for something not to exist, its very attempt acknowledges that existence. To erase something, you must first recognize its presence. And in doing so, you create a new memory in those who witness the act—the memory of what was and the deliberate effort to make it disappear.
To believe that removing the words Black Lives Matter from concrete can erase our memory, our existence, or our mark on this country? It is faint. It is cowardly.
The reason why this erasure is impossible is because of what Emilie M. Townes, a distinguished womanist theologian and ethicist, calls counter-memory.
Counter-memory is a method of resisting erasure, a strategy that disrupts ignorance and invisibility by reclaiming history rather than rejecting it. She describes it as the patient and persistent work of unearthing the truths of African American religious life, challenging the hollow, distorted identities created by the fantastic hegemonic imagination.
Photo of Emilie M. Townes courtesy of Vanderbilt Divinity School
Emilie M. Townes describes fantastic hegemonic imagination as a cultural force that manufactures myths, stories, and images designed to control the social order. It is the tool of those in power—those who rewrite history, those who distort narratives, those who need to control the memory of the oppressed to maintain their dominance.
For Townes, counter-memory is essential in the fight against structural evil because it exposes falsehoods in dominant narratives and restores the voices and experiences that have been erased. While she acknowledges that counter-memory isn’t perfect—that gaps and inaccuracies may emerge—it remains a powerful force for truth, hope, and justice.
This removal of the BLM Plaza mural is not just about paint on pavement. It is an act of strategic forgottenness, a state-sanctioned effort to edit out a movement that challenged the violence of the state. Townes writes that this kind of erasure does not happen by accident; it is a deliberate act of cultural production, an attempt to enforce amnesia on a people whose very existence resists it.
But here’s the truth: memory fights back.
RE-membering is the act of putting the pieces back together—again, and again, and again. Every time we tell the story, we call it back into presence.
A photo of Howard Thurman with his family. @ Photograph from Expanding Common Ground
Howard Thurman (1899–1981), a 20th-century theologian, mystic, and civil rights leader, understood the power of Black presence. He told his daughters a truth that remains relevant today:
“It takes the state legislature, the courts, the sheriffs and policemen, the white churches, the mayors, the banks and businesses, and the majority of white people in the state of Florida—it takes all these to keep two little Black girls from swinging in those swings. That is how important you are! Never forget, the estimate of your own importance and self-worth can be judged by how many weapons and how much power people are willing to use to control you and keep you in the place they have assigned to you.” (With Head and Heart, p. 97)
Today, the same is true. It takes the power of city officials, federal funding threats, and deliberate policy decisions to erase three words from the street.
That is how powerful Black people are. That is how wonderful our presence is.
The act of erasure says more about the erasers than it does about those they seek to erase. It exposes their fear—fear of accountability, fear of truth, fear of the story that cannot be silenced. It reveals that they know, deep down, that they do not control history.
Rev. Osagyefo Sekou In dialogue with Noam Chomsky. (Photo cred: Rev. Sekou’s Instagram)
Rev. Osagyefo Sekou, a theologian, activist, and musician known for his work in Black liberation theology and grassroots organizing, recently wrote about the fragility of Black Liberation Theology today. He reflected on his conversation with Noam Chomsky about how theologians who once challenged Empire were crushed by state power. He warns of those who claim the radical tradition but fail to act:
“Over a decade ago when I was a young man, I sat down the indomitable Noam Chomsky. We talked about the fact that the School of Americas celebrated crushing liberation theology in Latin America. These theologians scared the Empire—leading to a repression that is here now in the United States…The fact that James Cone’s most visible student supports genocide should give us pause. Most who claim tradition are wedded to a cowardly Democratic Party—more radical in their theology than their praxis. I am reminded of Oscar Romero who preached in the face of his assassins. Will we who claim the tradition make that kind of sacrifice?…”
So what do we do when they try to erase us?
We remember. We counter their forgetfulness. We preserve what they want buried. We carry our history with us—in our bodies, in our songs, in our stories, in our communities.
The words they removed from the street remain etched in us.
With every hammer blow, every grinding drill—each desperate attempt to tear BLACK LIVES from the concrete—there is a haunting memory in the soil that we MATTER…proven by the great lengths to which hegemony goes so very far to forget.
Walking Black Lives Matter Plaza with Faith In Action (February 2022)
RECOMMENDED READING
REFERENCES:
Emilie M. Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006).
On fantastic hegemonic imagination: p. 21.
On strategic forgottenness and erasure as domination: p. 26.
On counter-memory as resistance: p. 22.
Howard Thurman, With Head and Heart: The Autobiography of Howard Thurman (Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1979), p. 97.
Rev. Sekou, Instagram post, March 12, 2025.
Reuters, "Workers remove DC Black Lives Matter Plaza mural to avoid funding cuts," March 11, 2025. Available at:Reuters Article.
