Don’t ‘mistake backlash for failure’: NYC’s George Floyd protests, 5 years later
Don’t ‘mistake backlash for failure’_ NYC’s George Floyd protests, 5 years later – Gothamist
By Arun Venugopal
Published May 28, 2025
62 comments
https://gothamist.com/news/dont-mistake-backlash-for-failure-nycs-george-floyd-protests-5-years-later
Jawanza James Williams was a 30-year-old racial justice organizer when protests broke out five years ago in New York City and worldwide after George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis.
Williams, a Black, queer man from Bed-Stuy, led an “occupation” of City Hall Park. He was one of hundreds of people of different racial backgrounds who for weeks ate, slept and forged alliances beneath the Manhattan sky while urging city leaders to slash at least $1 billion in NYPD funding. The encampment culminated in the NYPD making arrests and injuring several demonstrators hours before a budget vote in City Hall.
“It was very much a real space with real problems,” said Williams, now the director of movement building at Vocal-NY, which advocates for low-income New Yorkers. “ What made it beautiful was that people were committed to confronting those problems” with “love, care, and compassion.”
Williams was one of thousands of New Yorkers who took to the streets to protest racial inequities five years ago, with a mixture of anger and idealism. Although the nation’s “racial reckoning” has since given way to a backlash nudged along by President Donald Trump, locally the scenario is more complicated, according to activists, academics and legal scholars who point to clear setbacks, relative gains and ways in which their demands for racial justice are still playing out in the halls of power.
Darrick Hamilton, the founding director of the New School’s Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy and a member of the New York City Racial Justice Commission, said that while “the politics of division” have defined the national landscape, elected officials and activists in New York have managed to translate the energy of the protests into tangible “infrastructure” with which to enact potentially lasting change.
This includes the city’s Racial Equity Plan and the Mayor’s Office of Equity and Racial Justice, which were created with overwhelming voter support in 2022 and are designed to reduce racial disparities in areas like health, policing and education. The charter change compels city government to acknowledge and regularly confront inequity in each of those areas, no matter how the prevailing political winds shift.
“Now, are we ready to spike the football? No,” Hamilton said. “But we have something by which to hold our municipality accountable and to build upon.”
Locally, racial justice activists helped establish a state reparations commission, tasked with studying the lingering effects of slavery and the possible payment of reparations. Monuments to former United States presidents that critics said glorified white supremacy were removed from their Manhattan locations. The city’s police oversight group was given additional resources.
Attempts to mitigate racial inequality in New York City since the protests have taken place even as public support for such measures has faded nationwide. In September 2020, 52% of Americans felt that increased attention to issues of racial inequality would lead to positive changes for Black people, according to the Pew Research Center. “That figure,” the Center said in a report earlier this month, “stands at just 27% today.”
Indeed, a number of equity issues elevated by Floyd’s murder and “Black Lives Matter” protests have been eclipsed by different politics and policies on the national stage. Coinciding with the fifth anniversary of Floyd’s murder, Trump earlier this month announced the end of consent decrees with local police departments — including in New York — to monitor law enforcement conduct.
The policy announcement is part of what Trump has called a “war on woke.” Through a flurry of executive orders, his administration has sought to undo diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives as well as other gains of the movement inspired by the deaths of Floyd, Michael Brown in one order Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014, and other African Americans at the hands of police. In issued in January, Trump sought to “end radical indoctrination in K-12 schooling.”
“In many ways we are fundamentally worse off now than we were five years ago,” said Lurie Daniel Favors, executive director of Medgar Evers College’s Center for Law and Social Justice and host of “The Lurie Daniel Favors Show” on SiriusXM.
The dark fog of the pandemic.
It can be easy to forget that the protests emerged during the pandemic, when public fears were ratcheted high by the lockdown, job losses and the very real fear of death from the COVID-19 virus. The police shooting deaths of Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, in Georgia and Kentucky, respectively, in the first months of 2020 helped stoke anger among Black New Yorkers as the pandemic hit that community especially hard, with Black New Yorkers dying at twice the rate as their white counterparts.
Then came the police killing of Floyd, under the knee of a white officer, Derek Chauvin. Video of his killing went viral, and within hours, people were protesting in Minneapolis. Within days, the protests spread to every state in the nation, and eventually to 60 countries.
“I’ve been organizing for decades, and we’ve seen uprisings before, but never like this,” said Shanelle Matthews, who served as the communications director for the national Movement for Black Lives and is a distinguished lecturer in anthropology and interdisciplinary studies at City College of New York.
The protests’ impact was felt at the highest echelons of industry and politics. Leading Democrats wore kente cloth at the U.S. Capitol and observed a moment of silence for Floyd. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon dropped to one knee at a branch in Westchester and told employees, “we are committed to fighting against racism and discrimination wherever and however it exists.”
Some of the most evident signs of the movement’s success related to historical symbolism and corporate hiring practices.
In the year after the Black Lives Matter protests, companies listed on the S&P 100 added more than 300,000 jobs – of which 94% went to people of color, according to a 2023 analysis by Bloomberg News. The number of Black workers filling “high-paying job categories” increased at 39 of those companies, including Microsoft, Pepsi, Meta and Lowe’s.
A statue of Thomas Jefferson, a president who owned hundreds of enslaved people, was removed from City Hall in New York City after 178 years, and a bronze statue of Theodore Roosevelt that had stood outside the American Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side since 1940 was moved away because, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio said, “it explicitly depicts Black and Indigenous people as subjugated and racially inferior.”
In New York, de Blasio and the City Council agreed to shift $1 million away from the NYPD budget– although critics such as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez say much of this was achieved through accounting tricks – and strengthen the Civilian Complaint Review Board. In 2022 voters overwhelmingly approved ballot proposals that changed the City Charter, requiring city officials to prioritize racial equity in areas such as policing, health and education. Some of the findings tied to the new obligations have been made public, though the effort has been marked by delays.
But public support for the movement soon waned, particularly in regard to policing and the “defund” objective. By the summer 2021, 47% of Americans said they favored increased police spending amid a nationwide rise in crime, according to the Pew Research Center, up from 31% in June 2020.
The shifting attitudes can also be seen in local politics. In 2021, New Yorkers elected a former police captain, Eric Adams, as the city’s 110th mayor. In 2025, leading mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo is calling for the hiring of 5,000 new NYPD officers.
Hamilton, who served on the New York City Racial Justice Commission, said that although voters backed the creation of “infrastructure” designed to achieve racial equity citywide, its implementation was contingent on whether New Yorkers maintained pressure on public officials
or allowed the issue to fade from public discussion. “The answer to these questions,” Hamilton said, “depends on us.”
Making sense of shifting sentiments
Favors said the movement’s spectacular growth and rapid unraveling could be explained by a theory known as the interest convergence principle. The idea was coined by the late legal scholar Derrick Bell, and, according to Favors, suggests that “ White Americans have been willing to support the expansion of rights for Black people if the expansion of those rights was also going to work to the benefit of white people.”
But some activists said the movement’s waning demanded introspection and a reassessment of what strategies worked and what fell short.
Rashad Robinson, a New York-based writer and consultant who formerly led the national civil rights group Color of Change, said calls to “defund the police” spurred an important conversation regarding the use of tax revenues. But he said the movement failed to convert momentum into lasting change.
“ In some ways a lot of the people who said they were repelled by notions of ‘defund’ wanted an easy out from a larger story of where we put our money in our society and how we spend it,” Robinson said.
“But at the end of the day, when our messages and narratives give them that easy out, we have to interrogate it,” he said. “So the question is not simply what we don’t fund, but what we do fund” whether that’s public education, parks or mental health services.
Matthews said protest groups were simply overwhelmed by the surge of interest, and “weren’t prepared to transform urban rebellions into sustained mass movements.”
“Our organizational infrastructure simply wasn’t equipped to absorb the influx of new people,” Matthews said. “It was a missed opportunity — and one we’re still reckoning with.”
Brooklyn College professor Jeanne Theoharis said her bigger disappointment is with the media, who she said “swarmed around the uprisings” but failed to adequately monitor institutions that had pledged to improve conditions for Black Americans.
“I think there’s going to be a lot of like, ‘What went wrong with the movement?’ and not a lot of media organizations having to grapple with their own complicity in what didn’t get done right,” Theoharis said.
Mistaking ‘backlash for failure’
For all the regrets about how the movement played out, Matthews said there was plenty to take pride in, including how people talk about racial justice and inequality.
“We changed the story,” Matthews said. “And in power-building, that’s half the battle.”
Robinson said the movement has struggled to achieve substantive change in certain arenas, including “how corporations act and who they hurt in terms of the rules that prevent discrimination.”
But he said one area that had witnessed genuine success was criminal justice reform, specifically the decline in the prison population across many states,
including New York, where dozens of state prisons have closed and where the inmate population has fallen to less than half of the levels seen in the late 1990s.
“It doesn’t mean that we’ve ended mass incarceration,” he said. “ What it means is that we’ve built new leverage, we’ve built new narrative, we have more people in motion, we have more political leaders asking the right questions and doing the right thing even when we’re not in the room.”
Theoharis said the Trump administration’s efforts to undermine and erase evidence of Black history, including by dismantling DEI initiatives and stripping identity-linked references from government websites, “is precisely because of the success” of the movement, which shone a light on structural racism and historic racial inequities.
The efforts, she said, began with Trayvon Martin’s fatal shooting by George Zimmerman in Florida in 2012, followed by the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson two years later, “effectively holding up a mirror” to American history in a way that eventually invited a backlash.
“I mean, it’s a relentless campaign around history,” said Theoharis, author of a new book, “King of the North: Martin Luther King Jr.’s Life of Struggle Outside the South.”
However, Matthews said it would be wrong to “mistake backlash for failure.”
“The intensity of the response we saw — media campaigns, political scapegoating, even federal charges against organizers — proves our demands were effective. Empire doesn’t attack what isn’t working.”
Looking into the future
Five years later, Williams of Vocal-NY holds onto memories of the encampment he helped organize outside City Hall. He remembers how hundreds of demonstrators sat and watched nighttime city budget proceedings via a projector, or how his fellow occupiers would do the laundry of people they’d just met, “clean their clothes, fold them and bring them back.”
“ I’m in a bit of a loss for words to really express, what happened there?” he said.
Since then, Williams said, he has reflected on what 2020 achieved, and where it fell short.
Williams said while the movement had proven its ability to mobilize the masses, it had yet to organize them into a sustained political force.
“If more people were involved in organization, perhaps the very next year, we wouldn’t have elected Eric Adams, a former police officer,” he said.
Favors, who called herself “ a pessimistic optimist who is very realist about the realities of our history in this country,” doesn’t expect a broad multifaith coalition to re-emerge any time soon. But she leaves open the possibility, noting that “ every day of the week there are protests taking place in some states and cities across the country.”
“ I think in some ways the wealthy have overplayed their hand in that they are creating such horrific economic conditions for everyone that it’s giving poor white people an opportunity to rethink,” she said.
The goal in the coming era, Williams said, was to not get people into the street but “into the rooms” and institutions where they can build lasting power.
“Because we’re going to need a different kind of force in this country to beat back this authoritarian turn,” Williams said. “But I believe in us. I believe we can do it. We’ve done it before and we have to do it now, because humanity is counting on us.”
