Police in Martinez, California said Sunday they were searching for two white people who were seen tearing up a Black Lives Matter mural less than an hour after it was painted in front of a local court on Saturday.
“The community spent a considerable amount of time putting together the mural just to paint it in a hateful and pointless way,” Chief Manjit Sappal of the Martinez Police Department said in a statement. “The city of Martinez values tolerance, and the damage to the mural was divisive and hurtful.”
Videos posted on social media show a white woman using a roller with black paint to cover the letters B and L in “Black Lives Matter,” while a white man records viewers yelling at them to stop.
The mural, in yellow paint in the middle of a city street, spelled “Black Lives Matter” in capital letters.
The man, who can be seen on video wearing a red cap and a red shirt that says “Trump” and “Four more years,” can be heard saying, “We are fed up with this narrative” and “The police brutality narrative. , the narrative of oppression, the narrative of racism. It’s a lie. It’s a lie. “
The man was also recorded going to a parked car nearby to retrieve a can of black paint.
The woman, using two expletives, tells viewers to “keep this up” in New York, adding: “This is not happening in my city.”
At one point, the man in the red shirt says to viewers: “Keep America great again, that’s correct. Why don’t you learn about history, the Emancipation Proclamation Law? and “You are only free by our ancestors.”
A woman can be heard off-camera telling the man that he is not “from America” and that he is a “colonizer.”
“Her ancestors are not from here,” she says.
“You don’t know anything,” replies the man in the red shirt.
That woman finally removes the can of black paint.
The relationship between the two people who were seen defacing the mural was unknown, and it was unclear what charges they could face. Police authorities were not immediately available to comment on Sunday night.
Justin Gomez, a local resident who obtained permission from the city to paint the mural, said of the vandalism on Sunday: “I’m not so surprised that it happened. I’m amazed at how bold they decided to be. “
The mural was painted on a one-block section of Court Street in Martinez, which is about 56 miles northeast of San Francisco. The city selected the location after Gomez, the lead organizer for Martizians for Black Lives, asked the city for permission to paint the message, he said.
“We ask to do it on the main street of our city,” said Gómez. The city, he said, offered the street in front of the Wakefield Taylor Courthouse.
“We agreed immediately,” he said, “and I think it was a more powerful statement than we had initially proposed.”
Mr. Gomez and local residents began painting the mural at 7 am Saturday; At 2:30 pm, with the paint still dry, he left.
At 3 p.m., Gomez said, he received messages saying the mural was being smashed.
Mr. Gomez said the mural had since been restored and that supporters were “maintaining a presence” to prevent further damage.
Similar murals have been painted in cities across the country, including Washington, New York, Dallas, and Los Angeles.
