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Black Lives Matter Plaza Is Gone. Its Erasure Feels Symbolic.
This week, government workers near the White House, on two blocks lined with luxury hotels and union headquarters, used a jackhammer and a pickax to tear up a mural that read “Black Lives Matter,” painted on the road during the long hot summer of 2020.
The symbolism was potent.
The erasure of the bold yellow letters of Black Lives Matter Plaza, installed on 16th Street after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, was a concession from Washington’s mayor, Muriel Bowser, who faced threats from congressional Republicans to cut off federal funds to the capital city if the words were not removed. But to Black Americans grappling with a fierce resurgence of forces that they believe are beating back the causes of social justice and civil rights, it felt like much more.
That plaza was “spiritual,” said Selwyn Jones, an uncle of Mr. Floyd. “But them taking the time to destroy it, that’s making a statement, man. That’s making a statement, like we don’t care.”
Even those who did not put much faith in the mural to begin with were taken aback.
“Bowser caving immediately to the faintest hint of pressure on the name of the plaza is somehow even more cynical than the move to name it Black Lives Matter Plaza in the first place,” said Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, a Black associate professor of philosophy at Georgetown.
“We saw the largest protest movement in our nation’s history, a unique and powerful moment where it seemed anything was possible, and you had the numbers to do anything,” lamented Samuel Sinyangwe, executive director of the nonprofit Mapping Police Violence, without exaggeration.
The millions of dollars that flowed to groups with “Black Lives Matter” in their titles have slowed to a trickle, forcing some to retrench, others to close shop. The Black Lives Matter Foundation Inc., for instance, 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.
As it recedes, Mr. Trump has sought to bury it. In two short months, his administration has moved to end diversity, equity and inclusion as goals of the federal government and pressured private industry to do the same. It shut down the National Law Enforcement Accountability Database, which tracked the misconduct records of federal law enforcement officers.
Words with even a hint of racial, ethnic or gender sensitivities are being struck from federal websites and documents. Just this week, the Environmental Protection Agency moved to eliminate offices responsible for addressing the disproportionately high levels of pollution facing poor communities, often with predominantly minority residents.
The billionaire White House adviser Elon Musk has even said pardoning George Floyd’s killer was “something to think about.”
Beyond Washington, journalists and academics who vaulted to stardom a half decade ago on their reinterpretations of history, their views on racism and their valorizing of the African American experience find themselves sometimes marginalized, and often under attack.
“I feel we are going backwards,” Mr. Jones said.
Given the swift change of circumstances, some in the Black Lives Matter movement say they must answer an existential question: How do they pursue racial justice amid so fierce a backlash?
“Folks got sold a bag of goods under this idea of racism and xenophobia,” said Addys Castillo, a social justice organizer and law student in Connecticut.
But, she said, the administration’s policies will hurt all those who aren’t wealthy, “so if there was ever a time to have a multiracial, cross cultural movement, this would be the time.”
James Forman Jr., a former public defender, an author and a fierce critic of the criminal justice system and its effects on people of color, said persuading all Americans that a system that has harmed Black Americans has harmed them too is difficult — but crucial.
“It’s always been hard to be able to get people to see two things at the same time: the ways in which these institutions disproportionately harm Black people, and the way that these institutions harm all people,” he said.
Ms. Bowser, who is Black, told laid-off federal workers earlier this month that the mural was a significant part of the city’s history, but circumstances have changed. “Now our focus is on making sure our residents and our economy survive,” she said.
Observers say the racial justice movement that crescendoed after Mr. Floyd, an unarmed Black man, was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020 had some successes, at least in raising public awareness about structural racism and police violence.
Protesters and Black activists pressed people to evolve from support for civil rights as “mere etiquette” to “an understanding that actual institutions, political institutions, criminal justice institutions had to be challenged to work differently,” Mr. Táíwò said.
But the movement must mature, said Representative Wesley Bell, a Missouri Democrat who rose to prominence after the police shooting of a Black teenager, Michael Brown, in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson. Mr. Bell, who is Black, defeated one of the most demonstrative Black progressives in the House, Cori Bush, in a heated primary last year, promising voters to bring Greater St. Louis a more sober, effective leadership.
“Some folks think it’s just about getting out and protesting,” said Mr. Bell, who advocates moving the social justice cause from the streets to the corridors of power. “The best protesters do not make the best politicians, and the best politicians don’t make the best protesters.”
Black Lives Matter began as an online hashtag after the 2013 acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager. But the phrase coalesced into a movement after the killing of Michael Brown the following year.
From the beginning the phrase drew attacks.
“When you say ‘Black lives matter,’ that’s inherently racist,” the former New York City mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani said in 2016. “Black lives matter. White lives matter. Asian lives matter. Hispanic lives matter.”
Four years later, as he campaigned unsuccessfully for re-election, Mr. Trump accused supporters of Black Lives Matter of “spreading violence in our cities” and “hurting the Black community.”
But in the summer of 2020, millions of Americans took to the streets from all walks of life. Conservative voices, like the president of the Heritage Foundation and Mr. Trump’s former ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, lamented Mr. Floyd’s murder.
Some of the protests turned violent. A Minneapolis police station was burned to the ground. The calls for incremental police reform became drowned by the rallying cry, “defund the police.”
And that gave Mr. Trump his most potent line of attack against the movement. He reframed a cause that hoped to protect Black lives as a lawless assault on police officers. In his telling, the leaders of the movement were avatars for every left-wing cause in his sights.
Because of the Black Lives Matter movement’s decentralized structure, many groups were lumped together and faced intense scrutiny, often with negative consequences for the movement as a whole.
“Any strategic or tactical misstep for the movement is going to produce more severe and swift negative consequences,” Mr. Forman said.
The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation, for instance, faced criticism that it misused funds, including the purchase of a $6 million California home.
“I’m not particularly happy with the organization Black Lives Matter, because of their shenanigans,” said Mr. Jones.
“Black Lives Matter, they are not a perfect organization,” said Angela Harrison, an aunt of Mr. Floyd. “They probably made mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. But their intention was for the good.”
But mistakes added up. The movement to examine historical ways racism has shaped current disparities in areas such as housing and wealth creation gave way to the opposite. Conservative activists successfully pushed state governments to ban teachings that they said made people feel inherently responsible for actions committed in the past.
Corporations that once made a show of racial, ethnic and gender sensitivities have begun rolling back their diversity initiatives, seemingly more afraid of the conservative activists fighting them than the social justice activists who had supported them, said Damon Hewitt, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
That, he said, “could certainly suggest that maybe the belief isn’t strongly held, but also more of a sense of resignation.”
Mr. Sinyangwe is taking a long view and sees parallels and patterns with many historical movements for social justice.
“This movement has followed the trajectory that freedom struggles in the United States have always tended to follow,” he said.
A marginalized community pushes back against injustice. Some of its demands are met, but others don’t materialize. So they push for more transformative changes only to be met with backlash. “And that’s sort of how America does business,” he said. “That’s not the fault of anyone’s slogan.”
In June 2020, after Mr. Trump marshaled federal law enforcement and the military to violently confront protesters outside the White House, Ms. Bowser announced that she was renaming a street just off the protest site “Black Lives Matter Plaza,” complete with 48-foot letters on the pavement.
The mayor’s decision to remove the letters with Mr. Trump’s return to power has been met with ambivalence. Some agree that Ms. Bowser has more pressing concerns, such as budget cuts and the slashing of the federal work force in her city.
“The painting ain’t saving any of us,” said Ms. Castillo.
Others are gearing up for a fight that will outlive any one presidency.
“I don’t believe we’ll ever be in a place where there won’t be a fight,” Mr. Bell said. “But I will say this — I don’t think that President Trump can stop progress either.”
Cartoonist Scott Adams poses with his a life-size cutout of his creation, Dilbert, in 2014.
Lea Suzuki/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
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Lea Suzuki/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images
Scott Adams, the controversial cartoonist who skewered corporate culture, has died at age 68, He announced in May 2025 that he had metastatic prostate cancer and only months to live.
Months later, in November, Adams took to X to request — and receive — some very public help from President Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in addressing health insurance issues that had delayed his treatment with an FDA-approved cancer drug called Pluvicto.
Adams said he was able to book an appointment the next day. Despite the Trump administration’s public intervention, Adams shared on his YouTube show in early January 2026 that “the odds of me recovering are essentially zero.”
Adams’ former wife, Shelly Miles, announced his death Tuesday during a YouTube livestream, and then read a statement from Adams who said, “I had an amazing life. I gave it everything I had. If you got any benefits from my life, I ask you pay it forward as best you can.”
Adams rose to fame in the early 1990s with his comic strip Dilbert, satirizing white-collar culture based on his own experiences working in company offices. He made headlines again in the final years of his life for controversial comments about race, gender and other topics, which led to Dilbert‘s widespread cancellation in 2023.
Dilbert, which at its height was syndicated in some 2,000 newspapers across 65 countries, spawned a number of books, a video game and two seasons of an animated sitcom.
“I think you have to be fundamentally irrational to think that you can make money as a cartoonist, and so I can never answer succinctly why it is that I thought this would work,” Adams told NPR’s Weekend Edition in 1996. “It was about the same cost as buying a lottery ticket and about the same odds of succeeding. And I buy a lottery ticket, so why not?”
He said that he had “pretty much always wanted to be a famous cartoonist,” even applying to the Famous Artists School, a correspondence art course, as a pre-teen.
“I was 11 years old, and I’d filled out the application saying that I wanted to be a cartoonist,” he said. “It turns out, as they explained in their rejection letter, that you have to be at least 12 years old to be a famous cartoonist.”
Turning to more practical matters, Adams studied economics at Hartwick College in Oneonta, N.Y. and earned an MBA from UC Berkeley. He also trained as a hypnotist at the Clement School of Hypnosis in the 1980s.
Adams began his career at Crocker National Bank, working what he described in a blog post as a “number of humiliating and low paying jobs: teller (robbed twice at gunpoint), computer programmer, financial analyst, product manager, and commercial lender.”
He then spent nearly a decade working at Pacific Bell — the California telephone company now owned by AT&T — in various jobs “that defy description but all involve technology and finances,” as Adams put it in his biography. It was there that he started drawing Dilbert, working on the strip on mornings, evenings and weekends from 1989 until 1995.
“You get real cynical if you spend more than five minutes in a cubicle,” he told NPR’s Weekend Edition in 2002. “But I certainly always planned that I would escape someday, as soon as I got escape velocity.”
Adams satirized corporate culture for decades
Scott Adams works on his comic strip in his California studio in 2006. He announced in May that he was dying of metastatic prostate cancer.
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Dilbert revolves around its eponymous white-collar engineer as he navigates his company’s comically dysfunctional bureaucracy, alongside his sidekick: an anthropomorphized, megalomaniac dog named Dogbert.
“Dilbert is a composite of my co-workers over the years,” Adams wrote on his website. “He emerged as the main character of my doodles. I started using him for business presentations and got great responses … Dogbert was created so Dilbert would have someone to talk to.”
Dilbert — with his trademark curly head, round glasses and always-upturned red and black tie — fights a constant battle for his sanity amidst a micromanaged, largely illogical corporate environment full of pointless meetings, technical difficulties, too many buzzwords and an out-of-touch manager known only as Pointy-haired Boss.
Even after Adams quit his day job, he kept a firm grasp on the absurdities and mundanities of cubicle life with help from his devoted audience.
He included his email address on the strip and said he got hundreds of messages each day. Recurring reader suggestions ranged from stolen refrigerator lunches to bosses’ unrealistic expectations.
“So they all, for example, say, ‘I need this report in a week, but make sure that I get it two weeks early so I could look at it,’” Adams said. “Just bizarre stories where it’s clear that they either have never owned a watch or a calendar or they are in some kind of a time warp.”
Dilbert‘s storylines evolved alongside office culture, taking aim at a growing range of societal and technological topics over the years. In 2022, Adams introduced Dave, the strip’s first Black character, who identifies as white — a choice critics interpreted as poking fun at DEI initiatives.
That ushered in an era of anti-woke plotlines that saw dozens of U.S. newspapers drop the strip in 2022, foreshadowing its widespread cancellation just a year later.
The comic strip was cancelled over Adams’ comments
Adams didn’t limit himself to cartoons. He was a proponent of what he called the “talent stack,” combining multiple common skills in a unique and valuable way: like drawing, humor and risk tolerance, in his case.
He ventured briefly into food retail at the turn of the millennium, selling vegetarian, microwavable burritos called Dilberitos. He published several novels and nonfiction books unrelated to the Dilbert universe over the years.
Adams was open about his health struggles throughout his career, including the movement disorder focal dystonia — which particularly affected his drawing hand — and, years later, spasmodic dysphonia, an involuntary clenching of the vocal cords that he managed to cure through an experimental surgery.
And he opined on social and political events on “Real Coffee with Scott Adams,” his YouTube talk series with over 180,000 subscribers.
His commentary, which often touched on race and other hot-button issues, led to Dilbert‘s widespread cancellation in February 2023.
In a YouTube livestream that month, Adams — while discussing a Rasmussen public opinion poll asking readers whether they agree “It’s OK to be white” (which is considered an alt-right slogan) — urged white people to “get the hell away from Black people,” labeling them a “hate group.” The backlash was swift: Dozens of newspapers across the country ditched Dilbert, and the comic’s distributor dropped Adams.
The incident also renewed focus on numerous controversial comments Adams had made in the past, including about race, men’s rights, the Holocaust and COVID-19 vaccines. Adams defended his remarks as hyperbole, and later said getting “canceled” had improved his life, with public support coming from conservative figures like Elon Musk and Charlie Kirk.
Adams, in his final years, was a vocal supporter of President Trump and a critic of Democrats.
But he extended his “respect and compassion” to former President Joe Biden in a video the day after Biden’s prostate cancer diagnosis became public in May 2025.
The prognosis was personal for Adams: He shared that he too had metastatic prostate cancer and only months to live, saying he expected “to be checking out from this domain sometime this summer.”
“I’ve just sort of processed it, so it just sort of is what it is,” he said on his YouTube show. “Everybody has to die, as far as I know.”
News
Iran acknowledges mass protest deaths, but claims situation under control as Trump mulls response
Iran’s theocratic rulers are under the most intense pressure they’ve felt in years, as President Trump leaves the option of a U.S. military intervention on the table in the face of a fast-mounting death toll amid more than two weeks of anti-government protests across the Islamic Republic.
Mr. Trump said Sunday that Iranian officials had called him looking “to negotiate” after his repeated threats to intervene if authorities kill protesters. In an unusual move, meanwhile, Iran‘s state-controlled media aired video on Sunday showing mass casualties in and outside a morgue in a Tehran suburb.
The video shared widely online shows dozens of bodies outside the morgue, which CBS News has geolocated to the southern Tehran suburb of Kahrizak. The bodies were wrapped in black bags, and people can be seen grieving and searching for their loved ones at the site.
The state TV reporter says in the clip that some of those seen dead may have been involved in violence, but that “the majority of them are ordinary people, and their families are ordinary people as well.”
Video posted by social media users on Sunday showed scenes from the same morgue, and people could be heard wailing in the background as others appeared to be looking for loved ones amid the bodies.
It is unclear why Iranian authorities might have chosen to show the mass casualties, but it could be an attempt to show sympathy with the protesters and to bolster their narrative that it is more radical actors, inspired by Mr. Trump’s messages of support, behind the violence, not the government.
President Trump and Iranian officials have escalated their warnings over the past week, with both sides insisting they’re ready for, but not seeking a military confrontation.
On Sunday, however, Mr. Trump said Iran’s leadership had called looking to talk.
Trump issues fresh warning, says Iran seeking negotiations
“The leaders of Iran called” yesterday, he told reporters Sunday on Air Force One, saying “a meeting is being set up … They want to negotiate.”
“We may have to act before a meeting,” Mr. Trump warned. He first warned 10 days ago that if Iran killed protesters, the U.S. would “come to their rescue,” but he’s yet to say what exactly would prompt some action against the regime, or what that might entail.
A senior U.S. official confirmed to CBS News on Sunday that the president had been briefed on new options for military strikes in Iran, after Mr. Trump warned that if the regime started “killing people like they have in the past, we would get involved.”
“We’ll be hitting them very hard where it hurts,” he said at the White House. “And that doesn’t mean boots on the ground, but it means hitting them very, very hard where it hurts.”
The U.S. has not yet moved any forces in preparation for potential strikes on Iran, officials with the military’s Central Command told CBS News over the weekend.
Iran’s top diplomat claims protests “under total control”
Iran did not confirm any direct outreach to the Trump administration, but speaking on Monday, Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi suggested the regime had brought the protests under control – repeating the government’s claim that the U.S. was to blame for the violence.
The “situation is now under total control,” Araghchi said, according to the Reuters news agency, as Iranian state TV aired video of massive pro-government demonstrations around the country.
Government-controlled broadcaster IRIB called one demonstration and funeral march an “Iranian uprising against American-Zionist terrorism.”
In the face of Mr. Trump’s repeated threats, Araghchi said Iran was “ready for war, but also for dialogue” with the U.S. at any time.
In another indication that the regime may believe it is weathering the storm, the foreign minister said internet service would be resumed in coordination with Iran’s security services, though he offered no specific timeline.
Rights groups say death toll from protests could be in the thousands
According to human rights groups based outside the country, which rely on contacts inside Iran, the death toll has already climbed into the hundreds.
The Washington D.C.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency said that, as of Sunday, the 15th day of protests, at least 544 people had been killed, including 483 protesters and 47 members of the security forces. HRANA said the unrest had manifested in 186 cities across all of Iran’s 31 provinces.
The Center for Human Rights in Iran (CHRI), which is also based in the U.S., said over the weekend that it had “eyewitness accounts and credible reports indicating that hundreds of protesters have been killed across Iran during the current internet shutdown,” accusing the regime of carrying out “a massacre.”
The Iran Human Rights (IHR) organization, based in Norway, said Saturday that it had confirmed at least 192 protesters were killed, but that the number could be over 2,000.
“Unverified reports indicate that at least several hundreds, and according to some sources, more than 2,000 people may have been killed,” IHR said in a statement, adding that according to its estimate, more than 2,600 protesters had been arrested.
HRANA estimates that over 10,000 people have been detained.
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