The police in Martinez, California said on Sunday that they were seeking two white people who were seen vandalizing a Black Lives Matter mural less than an hour after it was painted in front of a local courthouse on Saturday.
“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.”
Videos posted on social media show a white woman using a roller with black paint to cover the letters B and L in “Black Lives Matter,” while a white man records onlookers yelling for them to stop.
The mural, in yellow paint in the middle of a city street, spelt out “BLACK IN CAPITAL” in capital letters.
The man, who can be seen in a video wearing a red cap and a red shirt that reads “Trump” and “Four More Years,” can be heard saying:
“We’re sick of this narrative” and “The narrative of police brutality, the narrative of oppression, the narrative of racism. It’s a lie. It’s a lie.”
The man was also recorded going to a car parked nearby to retrieve a can of black paint.
The woman, using two expletives, tells onlookers to “keep this” in New York, adding, “This is not happening in my town.”
At one point, the man in the red shirt tells onlookers:
“Keep America great again, that’s right. Why don’t you guys learn about history, the Emancipation Proclamation Act?” and “You’re only free because of our forefathers.”
A woman can be heard off-camera telling the man he is not
“from America” and that he is a “colonizer.”
“Your ancestors aren’t from here,” she says.
“You don’t know nothing,” the man in the red shirt replies.
That woman eventually takes the can of black paint from them.
Watch the video below;
https://www.facebook.com/174545119861531/posts/578291816153524/
