The 1990s and 2000s had been disappointingly stagnant years in the fight for racial equality, Daniel Pease thought. He was concerned about the future of his mixed-race son, just 4 years old.
“I realize that the clock is ticking. We’re running out of time and I don’t want my son to grow the same way we do, “Pease told the Daily Journal in San Mateo, California.
After viewing photos of street art in Washington, DC, Boston, and New York, Pease asked Redwood City for permission to paint his own Black Lives Matter sign on the pavement near Courthouse Square on the fourth of July. City officials quickly accepted, and the city even provided him with a bucket of yellow paint.
Little did Pease know that city crews would forcefully wipe out the 17-foot artwork in the dead of night two weeks later, leaving only bare, discolored asphalt.
Authorities said they removed the piece on July 17 to avoid “driver confusion and traffic accidents” caused by street art, though no collisions occurred, city spokeswoman Jennifer Yamaguma wrote in an email. .
“No more art installations will be authorized on the streets of the city,” Yamaguma wrote.
But residents aren’t sure that the possibility of car accidents is the real reason for the art moratorium. They think that a woman’s request could be to blame.
When the yellow-painted Black Lives Matter sign appeared on Broadway on July 4, local attorney Maria Rutenburg thought the city’s streets had become an area for political discourse.
So he emailed the Redwood City Council “asking for permission to paint ‘MAGA 2020’ next door,” Rutenburg said. “I suggested the place and the type of painting and everything.”
But city officials rejected his request, citing the decision not to authorize street art.
Reluctant to accept no, Rutenburg tried again. “My application to paint MAGA 2020 stands was submitted,” he wrote.
During an interview, Rutenburg clarified that he never asked for the Black Lives Matter artwork to be erased. He simply insisted that the city provide him with an equal platform to express what is most important to her: the reelection of President Trump.
“It is not really about Black living for me. I didn’t fight BLM, ”said Rutenburg, who is white. “And I want to make sure that it is understood that I am not a racist.”
City officials did not respond to a question about whether Rutenburg’s emails had any weight in their decision to ban all street facilities, or whether road accidents were really the only concern. Either way, residents were unhappy with the city’s decision to erase the words.
More than 1,000 people signed a petition from Change.org to protest the removal of the artwork, which had become “a powerful reminder of one of the largest social justice movements in our country,” the petition says.
The “denial of the voice of the community in Redwood City is itself an example of white supremacy, privileging a white voice over that of the community,” he says.
In addition to the online petition, Rutenburg’s phone number and voicemail have become a forum for community views.
“I get around 500 calls a day right now,” he said. “Some people thank me for doing it. Some people say to me, ‘I know where you live, and I’m going to go after you.’ “
For Pease, the most daunting part is not that the city has removed the artwork, but that someone had “the audacity to get out … a backlash comparable to Black Lives Matter.”
The artwork was “just words on the street. It does not represent a real change,” he told the Daily Journal.
