In March, construction workers used pickaxes and jackhammers to destroy the Black Lives Matter Plaza in Washington, D.C. Five years after Black Lives Matter was canonized on the road to the White House in bold yellow letters, 35 feet tall and 48 feet wide, D.C.’s Black mayor, Muriel Bowser, agreed to erase it from the street just as fast as President Donald Trump swept former President Joe Biden’s DEI executive orders into the dustbin. Bowser acquiesced to Republican demands to remove the mural under threat of substantial cuts to the local budget. “We have bigger fish to fry,” she said, “than fights over what has been very important to us and to their history.”

The mural had been an act of defiance directed at Trump in the raucous twilight of his first administration. Nearly a week after the murder of George Floyd had inaugurated protests across the country, Trump’s security detail used a chemical agent to disperse a crowd gathered at Lafayette Park so that he could pose for a picture at the nearby St. John’s Church with a Bible. “We have the greatest country in the world,” Trump said as tear gas lingered in the air. “Keep it nice and safe.”

Days later, Bowser tweeted a magnificent troll of Trump: “Breonna Taylor, on your birthday, let us stand with determination. Determination to make America the land it ought to be.” Below the text was a video of Black Lives Matter written on the street. Hours after she posted, Trump disparaged Bowser as “grossly incompetent, and in no way qualified to be running an important city like Washington, D.C.” Later that fall, the painted street officially became Black Lives Matter Plaza NW. But local activists complained that the Bowser administration opposed the politics of the movement she invoked. Bowser had promised to extend the reach of law enforcement throughout the Black working-class city by investing in a new jail and more police officers. So her recent capitulation to right-wing attacks shouldn’t come as much of a surprise.

The impotence of Bowser and other Black elected officials in this moment of political revenge raises important questions: What is to be done in response to the Trump onslaught? How did we go from the enormous possibility of 2020, when upwards of 26 million people took to the streets to condemn systemic racism and declare that Black lives matter, to the darkness wrought by Trump’s return? What happened?

The answer cannot be found among Black elected officials. They are marginal actors in the Black Lives Matter era, except for their periodic, feverish efforts to appear connected to the movement in hopes of either cashing in electorally or deflecting the criticism of younger activists. Indeed, the failure of mainstream Black politics, specifically Black Democrats, to connect with young Black people played a critical role in Kamala Harris’s failed bid to become president in 2024. Harris conceded to right-wing attacks on so-called woke politics, including retreating from many of the progressive positions she had held just four years earlier, when she first ran for president and then was selected as Biden’s running mate. In 2024, in an effort to distance herself from the taint of woke, she reduced her appeals to Black audiences to cultural tropes like insider talk about Black sororities and fraternities, while evading any talk about racial justice and economic justice. She had nothing significant to say about the Supreme Court’s ban on affirmative action, another conservative effort to denude racism of any explanatory power. Harris’s fear of engaging with racial politics meant that her appeals to try to win back Black men included vows to legalize weed and protect crypto. It was insulting. But Harris is not unique. The Democratic Party, even with the most Black elected officials ever and the greatest number of Black women in office, delivers no meaningful change.

In some cases, Black Lives Matter helped to elect younger candidates who hope to transform protest into politics, like Mayor Brandon Johnson of Chicago. But the movement failed to translate its political gains and sheer dominance from 2014 to 2020 into lasting organization that could have sustained pressure on the people it helped put into office. Instead, the movement largely demobilized after the 2020 presidential race, and more so after local elections. That meant that small victories were fleeting, electoral successes have been hollowed out, and the demands of a movement that disavowed leadership and political accountability have been crushed in the neo-fascist backlash of Make America Great Again.

The movement’s lack of a political center and its inability to cohere around political ideas, strategy, or tactics created an atmosphere of freelancing. Everyone did their own thing. Moreover, when Biden and the Democratic Party began to back away from their campaign promises, none of the forces within the movement organized any real response. A promised seat at the table and proximity to power hemmed in activism, giving Biden a free ride. There were few political protests against the Biden administration until the Palestinian solidarity movement emerged in the spring of 2024.

In the coming months and years, Black politics must do more than shape its strategy, tactics, and ideas in reaction to Trump. We need an account of what went wrong in the Black Lives Matter era. This isn’t a matter of recrimination or rehashing old narratives; to move forward, we must understand what happened to the largest and most significant Black movement in two generations. What did we learn, what lessons can be generalized, what mistakes can be corrected? Crucial debates that have been smothered must be allowed to breathe: How should the movement relate to the Democratic Party? What is the role of democracy in building a movement? How do we ensure political accountability within a movement? What is the role of identity politics in our movement? Can a movement called Black Lives Matter win the kind of social transformation needed to make Black lives matter?

The failure to face hard questions leaves us vulnerable to repeating the errors of the past, but this time with greater consequences.

To be sure, these questions pervade the entire American left, which has been staggered by the scale and intensity of the Trump attack. The era of Black Lives Matter has probably come to an end as the Trump attacks reach tens of millions of Americans across lines of race and ethnicity. The need for renewed politics of solidarity has never been greater. In many ways, the protests of 2020 broke through the barriers to solidarity; the strength of that protest movement was its multiracial character. Some have estimated that up to 52 percent of demonstrators were white, while 20 percent were Black and another 20 percent Latino. It was the movement that the right feared the most, which might explain the ferocity of the backlash.

Yet Black politics will always be viable in a society as racist as the United States. Black people, historically locked out of the gains of American wealth, are less inured to the lies surrounding social mobility. Black activism has almost always catalyzed other kinds of activism here. And as racism has consistently divided the working class, ordinary Black people have been forced to create their own responses to discrimination. But in the past 40 or so years, as class differences have deepened in Black communities, the ties that have bound Black people together have frayed. This separation between the Black poor and working class from Black elites and the Black political class raises new political questions about the most effective way to change the social and economic conditions for Black people.

And yet Black politics alone cannot free Black people. The United States needs multiracial organizing. The uprising of 2020 showed not only its possibility but also its powerful future. As the Trump administration masterfully wields anti-immigrant and anti-Black racism to undermine a united response to its malicious attack on the entire working class, either we will build a united movement or we will be destroyed.