Black Lives Matter Plaza is gone from Washington, D.C. The bold yellow letters that once protested police violence are now paved over, though police killings nationally are actually up.
The Justice Department has abandoned oversight agreements for police forces accused of racial bias, even as it begins an investigation of Chicago after the city’s Black mayor praised the number of Black people in top city jobs. The U.S. refugee resettlement program is effectively shut down, but white South Africans have been granted an exception.
Sunday is the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer, a searing moment of brutality that ignited what may have been the largest social movement in U.S. history. Five years later, the movement that his death helped begin may feel like it’s in reverse.
There has always been a rhythm to American social movements: forward momentum followed by backlash. Abolitionism’s triumph gave way to the Ku Klux Klan and the end of Reconstruction. Civil rights marches dissipated, as Richard M. Nixon and his “silent majority” rose to power.
But even by historical standards, the current retrenchment feels swift and stark. Five years ago, Republicans and Democrats shared the nation’s streets to denounce police violence and proclaim that Black lives matter. Now, Donald J. Trump, a president who has long championed white grievance, is setting the tone of racial discourse.
To conservatives, the shift is a necessary course correction away from violence in the streets and crippling mandates that overburden police departments.
“President Trump is tirelessly enacting policies to ensure America’s safety, prosperity, and success for all Americans,” said Harrison Fields, a White House spokesman. “The Trump Administration is committed to stopping crime, upholding justice, protecting communities, and empowering federal, state, and local law enforcement.”
But Manisha Sinha, who teaches American history at the University of Connecticut, sees the resurgence of old power structures as intentional though not inescapable.
“I don’t think that there’s something inevitable or cyclical about it,” Dr. Sinha said. “As historians, we know that things just don’t happen on their own.”
To be sure, the Black Lives Matter movement well predated Mr. Floyd’s death, emerging from the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin in 2013 and the 2014 deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in New York, both of which happened at the hands of the police.
But it exploded after the killing of Mr. Floyd. A half million people turned out in nearly 550 communities across the United States on a single day, June 6, 2020. Between 15 million and 26 million people participated in demonstrations or showed their support in the weeks after May 25, 2020, including Republican mainstays such as Mitt Romney, the party’s 2012 presidential nominee, and Nikki Haley, Mr. Trump’s first ambassador to the United Nations.
Much has changed since then. Earlier this month, the Pew Research Center found that 72 percent of Americans say “the increased focus on race and racial inequality after Floyd’s killing did not lead to changes that improved the lives of Black people.” The popularity of the Black Lives Matter movement has dipped 15 percentage points from its June 2020 peak, though a slight majority of the public still voiced support.
The toll can be personal. Selwyn Jones, 59, still speaks out about the death of his nephew, Mr. Floyd, under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin. But as one of a handful of Black people in his small South Dakota town, Mr. Jones said his activism had alienated some people he once considered close.
“Those people that I thought were my friends, that I’ve known for 20 plus years, I haven’t talked to any of them in about five years,” Mr. Jones said.
Ibram X. Kendi, a professorial proponent of “antiracism,” has seen his academic star dim since 2020, when he founded the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University with $55 million in donations. But in an interview, he said he still was taking the long view. The “antiracist revolution” has slowed, he conceded, but it was never going to ascend unimpeded.
“I know it became particularly popular in recent decades that there’s this singular arc of racial progress,” said Dr. Kendi, who will lead the Institute for Advanced Study at Howard University. “It’s political rhetoric, but it’s actually not historical reality.”
Still, it is difficult to ignore the headwinds facing racial justice activists, especially when those gusts seem to be blowing hardest from the highest levels of American power.
Mr. Trump may have vowed in his second inaugural address to “forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based,” but the president’s belief that “anti-white” discrimination has tilted society in favor of African Americans remains a driver of administration policy. Those policies include the dismantlement of “diversity, equity and inclusion” in government, the targeting of perceived racial preferences in academia and the private sector and the rooting out of what Mr. Trump called “improper ideology” at the Smithsonian Institution.
As far back as 1989, Mr. Trump said, “if I were starting off today, I would love to be a well-educated Black, because I really believe they do have an actual advantage.” In the 1990s, Mr. Trump expressed concern that white people losing majority status would lead to a revolution.
In an Oval Office exchange on Wednesday with President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa, Mr. Trump accused the leader of not doing enough to protect the white South Africans who he said were “being executed.” He also has falsely claimed a genocide against white people was taking place. During the meeting Mr. Trump referred repeatedly to “dead white people.”
For some who achieved a new level of fame after Mr. Floyd’s death, to only later receive recriminations and scorn, the last five years have been disorienting.
“I’ve tried not to take it personally,” said Dr. Kendi, whose scholarship has been impugned by Mr. Trump’s supporters and whose tenure at Boston University included charges of mismanagement that were later dismissed. “I know it has less to do with me and more to do with this attempt to make people like me, or the people who are doing the type of work that I’m doing, into these scary, harmful characters.”
But Dr. Kendi has also faced criticism from his ostensible allies that his framework for antiracist activism is unworkable and counterproductive. Dr. Kendi has said that most of his critics “either haven’t read my work or willfully misrepresent it.”
In the wake of Mr. Floyd’s murder, the Black Lives Matter Foundation Inc. raised a staggering $79.6 million in fiscal year 2021. The next year, that figure was down to almost $8.5 million. By 2023, it was about $4.7 million, with expenses of $10.8 million, according to records tracked by the nonprofit journalism organization ProPublica. Allegations of mismanagement have ricocheted between the foundation and its funders, which harmed the reputation of the movement’s leaders.
Historians note that even when social movements are met with backlash, change is never fully rolled back. Despite the violence and terror used by southern states to suppress full Black citizenship in the post-Reconstruction era, slavery was not reinstituted.
And Black activism is American activism, said Dr. Steven Hahn, a professor at New York University, even if some of the white allies who once stood shoulder to shoulder with Black protesters have turned away,
“You wouldn’t have democracy in this country, or at least a sense of a robust democracy without Black people and their own struggles,” he said. “They were the most committed to real democracy that was not bound by exceptions and exclusions.”
But Professor Hahn expressed real worry.
“People get silenced, and then before you know it,” he said, “we’re really back at a really bad square one.”
The police reform movement that was sparked by Mr. Floyd’s murder has had lasting impacts. Many police departments still require officers to wear body cameras. No-knock warrants are banned in some areas. Data collection on police brutality has been enhanced.
Mr. Trump’s efforts to eradicate D.E.I., which critics say has become a catchall term to describe policies that benefit anyone who is not white and male, is beginning to meet grass roots resistance. On Wednesday, the big-box retailer Target reported a drop in foot traffic and sales, a response in part to its retreat from diversity policies, in part to tariff anxiety. The company’s sales fell 3.8 percent last quartered compared with the same quarter a year ago.
On the flip side of that is Michael Green, who like many was moved by the protests of 2020. A self-described “flag nerd,” Mr. Green thought marchers should have proper banners that could match the iconography of Mr. Trump’s movement, so he started Flags for Good, which makes signage for progressive causes, including Black Lives Matter.
A company once run out of a spare bedroom has now become a career. Items in the Black Lives Matter section in particular have seen a huge leap in sales that, he said, was driven by Mr. Trump’s re-election.
