SELAH, Wash. -- First came the warning: A police officer in the small city of Selah, Washington, told a group of young people that if they continued drawing "Black Lives Matter" chalk art on the sidewalk in front of City Hall, they would be charged with a crime.Then came the pressure washer.As
SELAH, Wash. — First came the warning: A police officer in the small city of Selah, Washington, told a group of young people that if they continued drawing “Black Lives Matter” chalk art on the sidewalk in front of City Hall, they would be charged with a crime.As the 10 protesters covered parts of their artwork with their bodies, a city worker walked between them, spraying away the exposed parts of their messages and sending tubs of chalk tumbling into the street.
Chalk art has long been a tableau for social activism, a form of instant commentary that takes political expression quite literally onto the streets. Cities have at times targeted it, such as in San Diego, where a man was charged with 13 counts of vandalism in 2013 for writing anti-bank messages on a public sidewalk. A jury acquitted him.
At one point, a letter from Police Chief Richard Hayes arrived addressed to Fabian’s older brother. It said the chalk drawing “is, by definition, graffiti” and could result in a citation. She said the family was stunned to see the Confederate flag openly flown by some people in the community and emblems of it worn at school.
The city insisted that it had a policy of cleaning away any chalk art it found, no matter the message, though Perez said she had seen no efforts to remove recent chalk art tied to school graduations. The lawyer working with Fabian’s family, Joseph Cutler, said that the city’s targeted cleaning of the protest messages amounted to an infringement on free speech.
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