Within an hour after a Martinez, California community came together to paint — with the city's permission — Black Lives Matter on the street, a hateful MAGA man (oops, that's redundant) and Karen sidekick begins to cover it in black paint.
People are shouting at the couple to stop what they're doing, to which the red-capped man says, among other things, “We’re sick of this narrative…The narrative of police brutality, the narrative of oppression, the narrative of racism. It’s a lie. It’s a lie.”
“Your ancestors aren’t from here,” Karen says. As if hers are.
After much back and forth, and after the B and L are painted over, a woman grabs the paint away. Now the Martinez police are looking for the vandals.
From The New York Times:
“The community spent a considerable amount of time putting the mural together only to have it painted over in a hateful and senseless manner,” Chief Manjit Sappal of the Martinez Police Department said in a statement. “The city of Martinez values tolerance, and the damage to the mural was divisive and hurtful.”
The mural was painted on a one-block stretch of Court Street in Martinez, which is about 35 miles northeast of San Francisco. The city selected the location after Mr. Gomez, the lead organizer for Martizians for Black Lives, asked the city for permission to paint the message, he said.
“We asked to do it on our city’s main street,” Mr. Gomez said. The city, he said, offered the street in front of the Wakefield Taylor Courthouse instead.
“We immediately agreed to it.” he said…
The painting has since been restored.
