Once reviled, the chain link fence surrounding the White House and Washington Square is now seen as a bulletin board of art and artifacts dedicated to George Floyd and hope
Hand-lettered signs and a sweatshirt hang on the fence surrounding the White House at the entrance to Lafayette Park in Washington on Monday, June 8, 2020. In its brief life, the black chain-link fence surrounding the White House has gone from reviled to beloved to something of a capital landmark, however temporary. (Michael A. McCoy/The New York Times)
WASHINGTON — In its brief life, the black chain-link fence surrounding the White House has gone from reviled to beloved to something of a capital landmark, however temporary. As with so much in America these days, perspectives change fast.
“We’ve taken the negativity of this wall and made it into something positive,” declared Adele McClure, who was part of a crowd of a few hundred protesters outside the White House late Tuesday night.
McClure, of Arlington, Virginia, said her perspective had shifted rapidly about the fence. “At first I thought it was messed up,” she said. It was a sign of a leader who was isolating himself behind a fortress. But she now views the structure — which was installed to protect the White House from people demonstrating against the killing caught on video of George Floyd, an unarmed black man, in police custody — as a symbol of hope, beauty and “people coming together to transcend walls.”
Other protesters were perusing the chain-linked collage of signs, messages and artwork that covered nearly every part of the 8-foot barrier across Lafayette Park — a kind of chaotic bulletin board cluttered with “Black Lives Matter” logos, renderings of Floyd and statements of ridicule, often profane, aimed at the president who lived inside the barricades.
The protesters were studying the structure less as a forbidding obstacle than as a makeshift art installation. It was evidence that cries for help like those of Floyd, who gasped for air and called out to his dead mother as a police officer pressed his knee into his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, can transform into rallying cries. Or that an eyesore can become an icon.
©2019 New York Times News Service