But five years on, the protesters are gone and an iconic monument outside the White House has been erased, leaving many to wonder if the movement blew its chance for historic change by failing to win over the American public.
“It’s very easy to wear the T-shirt, utter the slogan, but then you looked at what they were asking for,” Yohuru Williams, who runs the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St Thomas, told AFP.
Despite widespread revulsion at racism and police brutality in the wake of Floyd’s May 2020 death, many turned away when BLM activists broadened their message to calling for the defunding of law enforcement.
National support for the Black Lives Matter movement is now 52 percent, according to Pew Research, down 15 percentage points since June 2020, a month after police officer Derek Chauvin killed Floyd during an arrest in Minneapolis.
Initially, Floyd’s death was hailed as a catalyst for a national reckoning similar to the 1960s civil rights movement.
Protests, some turning into riots, spread across the country — right up to the gates of the White House, where Donald Trump was serving his first term.
Pent-up energy from Covid lockdowns fed the anger, which coalesced around BLM, until then a loose organization founded in 2013 to protest racially motivated violence.
Activists soon widened their focus to systemic racism, with monuments of slave owners removed and some companies investing in diversity initiatives to support ethnic minorities.
Missed opportunity