June: Two Trips to DC
Visiting the site of protests following George Floyd's murder
This diary entry, from June 14, 2020, looks at two visits to Washington, D.C., following the murder of George Floyd and an eruption of protests across the country. The diary serves as supplemental material to my photo book — Keep Your Distance. Unless otherwise noted, the photos in this series are not part of the book.
Six days after the president posed with a Bible outside St. John’s Church following protests in our nation’s capital, Jill and I decided to walk into D.C. from our home in Alexandria.
The seven-mile walk on June 7 was something we had never done before, separately or together. We walked up to the Lincoln Memorial, our family’s favorite, then down into the Vietnam Memorial and over to the perimeter of the White House, where we wanted to see and pay tribute at the site of the protests that have both galvanized and divided our nation.
A giant Black Lives Matter mural has been painted on the D.C. streets leading to the White House. Protests have continued daily, with crowds of varying degrees, but they have been largely peaceful.
We got there just after a protest ended, and the streets beyond the Black Lives Matter Plaza felt empty. The black mesh metal fence around the White House and Lafayette Square gave the area a dystopian feel.
You could not help but be disturbed/stunned/hurt/moved by the boarded-up businesses and broken glass, combined with graffiti that had been sprayed on statues and buildings.
We walked around, then boarded an empty Metro car and came home.
The cleanup began last week, and the fence around Lafayette Square — home to First Amendment protests for more than a century — finally was taken down on Thursday. It remained around the perimeter of the White House.
On Friday afternoon (June 12), after a long week spent writing two magazine features about schools and the pandemic and the effect of the coronavirus and protests on black students, I decided to go back to our nation’s capital.
With little to no humidity and temperatures in the low 80s, many people had come out to the plaza to see the site. Families took photographs together. Cleanup crews continued their work. Food and water, all donated, was available. Vendors sold T-shirts and buttons. Two groups held voter registration drives.
Folks looked at the signs and murals left behind, amazing pieces of art that portrayed anguish, anger, pain, and hope.
To mark the pandemic’s fifth anniversary, these “Social Distancing Diary” installments will appear two to three times a month on Thursdays until March 2026. To see previous entries, visit this link.
Keep Your Distance: Walking Through the First Year of COVID is available for $40 plus $5.95 for shipping and handling. You can order it by visiting this link.