In 2020, after a summer of protests rocked U.S. cities, the words “Black Lives Matter” went from the rallying cry of racial justice demonstrators to words lining the very roads along which they marched.After the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, towns and cities nationwide commissioned artists to paint BLM street murals in solidarity with the reckoning on police brutality and racism prompted by the unprecedented, multiracial mass rallies.Five years on, many of the murals are still maintained by activists and community groups, while wear and tear, construction and vandalism spelled the end of others. And the mural widely thought to have inspired them all — 35-foot-tall (11-meter-tall) yellow capital letters painted on a street one block from the White House — is gone.Muriel Bowser, the mayor of Washington, D.C., ordered crews to remove the BLM mural in March under pressure from the Republican-led Congress. Bowser noted …
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