theintercept--2020-07-19--All Statues Are Local: The Great Toppling of 2020 and the Rebirth of Civic Imagination

Almost as soon as the protests following the police killing of George Floyd went national , in the last weekend of May , they became , everywhere they happened , also deeply local .
In Richmond , Virginia , protesters immediately focused on Monument Avenue , the grand boulevard that runs through the elegant Fan District , and its procession of grandiose statues and memorials honoring the Confederacy .
They coated the pedestal of Robert E. Lee ’ s equestrian statue with a mix of messages marking the national moment : remembering Floyd and others , against police in general @ @ @ @ @ @ @ But the visual information that sprung up at the monument site marshaled local references , too , ones particular to Richmond events and dynamics .
Quickly , an elegant wood-carved sign appeared that welcomed visitors to “ Beautiful Marcus-David Peters Circle , Liberated by the People , ” named for a man whom Richmond police killed in 2018 .
After someone removed it overnight , a new one , even bigger and more solid , was planted in its place .
The designation stuck as protesters and even local journalists shared updates on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ — an act of renaming by collective fait accompli .
Six weeks later , Monument Avenue has been utterly transformed , at a speed that neither detractors nor defenders of the statues anticipated , having been deadlocked for decades in arguments , protests , studies , and urban-design exercises — not to mention a Virginia state law that prevented cities from removing these monuments that was repealed early this year .
By decision of the mayor , Levar Stoney , the city of Richmond has removed the four Confederate statues under its control @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , J.E.B .
Stuart , and Matthew Fontaine Maury — following a cue from the protesters , who pulled down the Davis statue themselves , separating it from the bombastic , colonnaded shrine to the Confederacy of which it was the centerpiece .
The Lee statue , meanwhile , is slated to come down by decision of Virginia ’ s governor , Ralph Northam , though a last-ditch lawsuit filed by defenders of the statue needs to be overcome .
In the meantime , however , MDP Circle has become not just the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ vital national — even global — reference in this season of insurrection , as images have circulated daily of the organic culture that has sprouted there .
Black Virginians have made emotional pilgrimages to reclaim a space that for over a century was physically orchestrated to signify their exclusion and subordinacy .
There have been rallies , spontaneous concerts , and innumerable spontaneous photo shoots , poignant and defiant .
Nightly projections onto the statue and pedestal , by local artists Dustin Klein and Alex Criqui , have become the most powerful visual @ @ @ @ @ @ @ images have included political quotes and images of Floyd , other victims of police , and great figures in Black history .
The scenes from Richmond have boosted protesters elsewhere in a loop of creative emulation .
They express , in ways that are inherently impossible to disentangle , both the clear set of shared national concerns that have coalesced a movement , and the city ’ s idiosyncratic local mix of Black politics , a grassroots-minded artist community , and vibrant punk , skater , and anti-fascist scenes .
There are similar @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with its own unique flavor .
The Sound and the Fury The movement is national , a response to blanket afflictions : structural racism , police brutality , the exhaustion of the American social order , the nonstop insult of President Donald Trump , and the public health and economic horror of the Covid-19 pandemic .
But every action within the movement is local .
The emergence of statues , monuments , and public art — both magnets for protest and levers for government response , friendly or otherwise — as fulcrum points @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hybrid civic space .
Each statue is a marker for a national apparatus of power that is now broadly understood as a system that , whatever its past promise , has failed the people .
It is also an element , sometimes a focal point , in an organic local history of struggle , resistance , and political and administrative negotiation .
The combination has been catalytic .
Even as many statues have been symbolically killed — some toppled by protesters , many more removed by authorities — they have come alive , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ political expression that has overflowed both the conventional terms of debate and , also , thanks to decentralized digital media , its conventional vessels .
When protesters have done the honors , they have brought ritual care and chaotic fury .
Thus , Native activists escorted the tumbling of a Christopher Columbus statue on the state Capitol grounds in St. Paul , Minnesota , with singing and drumming , transforming the event into a devotional scene .
Likewise , in Los Angeles , the toppling of Junípero Serra , the brutal priest who @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was followed by placing onto the pedestal fruit and flower offerings .
Yet other toppling scenes have emphasized symbolic retributive violence .
In one of the trans-Atlantic occurrences that have both amplified and fed back into the American wave , protesters in Bristol , U.K. , pulled down a statue of the 17th-century merchant Edward Colston , then knelt on its neck , in honor of George Floyd , before tossing it in the harbor : a drowning that inescapably evokes the Middle Passage .
And in Raleigh , North Carolina , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ soldiers from the large memorial fronting the state Capitol and dragged them in the street by ropes around their necks .
The crowd left one on the courthouse steps and hung the other from a street light , the whole sequence brimming with echoes of the choreography of lynching .
( A wire photo caption even used the term . )
Later , the governor would order the dismantling of the whole memorial .
Meanwhile , at least one toppling lurched from joy to horror , when in Portsmouth , Virginia , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Confederate memorial at the site of a former slave market injured a member of the crowd .
And when a militia in Albuquerque , New Mexico , confronted protesters at the monument to the Spanish colonist Juan de Oñate , one of the vigilantes shot a protester , causing serious injury .
( That monument , too , has now been officially dismantled . )
Statue and monument removals by public authorities have been more demure , of course , obeying reasons of politics , decorum , and safety : statues roped around @ @ @ @ @ @ @ straps under the horse ’ s belly and lifted by cranes ; pillars and obelisks taken down in sections , revealing hitherto unknown aspects of their construction , and in at least a few cases in the South , late 19th-century time capsules .
Even so , there have been decisions to make about the timing , visibility , and mise-en-scène of removals .
Richmond went for broad daylight , allowing an ecstatic crowd to gather around the workers taking down the Stonewall Jackson statue .
The Maury and Stuart statues also came @ @ @ @ @ @ @ but with news spreading quickly enough , once the workers appeared , that Richmonders were able to gather for those removals too .
Elsewhere , local governments have taken down monuments quietly , in the wee hours , and in some instances , in early June , under the cover of curfews .
For instance , Birmingham , Alabama , removed its 52-foot tall obelisk honoring the Confederacy , which dominated the approach to City Hall and the Jefferson County Courthouse for a century ; a local reporter ’ s lone livestream monitored @ @ @ @ @ @ @ happened to catch it .
The next morning , people in Alexandria , Virginia , also found the Confederate soldier statue gone from a major Old Town intersection ; the removal had already been planned , in an agreement between the city and the United Daughters of the Confederacy , its owners , but the protests accelerated its demise .
And if many cities went for maximum secrecy , the removal of the Christopher Columbus statue in downtown Newark , New Jersey , while unannounced and with no media presence , took place @ @ @ @ @ @ @ musicians called on short notice , by a city official , to provide ritual rhythms .
Far From Over The Great Statue Toppling of 2020 is far from over .
In addition to landmarks in cities like Richmond , Birmingham , Raleigh , or Charleston , South Carolina — where the late 19th-century statue of the pro-slavery , antebellum Vice President John C. Calhoun is now gone , along with its 115-foot pedestal — the movement has claimed dozens of Confederate memorials in small Southern towns .
Scholars who specialize in the subject @ @ @ @ @ @ @ armada of Columbus statues , long considered untouchable due to purported Italian American sensitivities , have been retired with little incident , toppled in Minneapolis and formally removed in a string of midsized East Coast cities , as well as a city named for the explorer himself : Columbus , Ohio .
( An Andrew Jackson statue is also due for removal in Jackson , Mississippi . )
In Philadelphia , the city removed its long-contested statue , fronting City Hall , of Frank Rizzo , the racist 1970s mayor .
A mural @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gone , the now-bare wall serving , on a recent night , as an activist-organized outdoor projection screen .
And while the spectacular protest-led teardowns have slowed , the once-glacial deliberative process in city councils and county boards of supervisors has sped up .
It is all but ensured that more monuments will be challenged , the question put to officials who long sought to avoid the issue , and taken down .
The process is already causing small earthquakes in local civic life .
In Lafayette County , Mississippi , for instance @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all white men — opposed removing the Confederate memorial outside the county courthouse , even though the mayor of Oxford , the county seat , wants it gone .
Meeting on the same day as that vote , July 6 , two other Mississippi county boards went the other way : The Bolivar County board voted unanimously to remove its own memorial , and the Lowndes County board reversed itself , deciding to remove its similar monument after having voted two weeks earlier to keep it .
In the space of that fortnight @ @ @ @ @ @ @ made in an interview with a local reporter , had caused a major furor .
And the Mississippi legislature , of course , had made the historic decision to finally retire the egregious state flag , with its Confederate battle-emblem canton .
As the wave of monument removals swelled , it attracted increasing attention as an aggregate phenomenon , and less to the local specifics .
This may be inevitable , to an extent .
But , in going broad , much of the discussion has become unproductive , distanced from the human @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the energy of this moment resides .
Trump and his supporters are agitating the specter of some concerted mob attack , enabled by pliant and mostly Democratic elected officials , against monuments and memorials to American historical figures in general .
The Trumpists take care to omit Confederate names from their specific examples in favor of more consensual figures whose statues , in reality , face little or no credible threat .
A transparent fearmongering tactic with obvious racist undertones , it signals support to defenders of Confederate memorials who are regrouping in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ monument sites , filing lawsuits , or taking out newspaper ads .
Another dismal line of discussion is the one that considers which historical figures deserve , or not , to be celebrated .
Its effect is mainly to activate slippery-slope arguments that proceed in bad faith — “ Where does it end ?
” — and to prompt bizarre , personalized interventions around particular individuals .
Consider , for instance , an op-ed by a descendant of Thomas Jefferson , arguing for the Jefferson Memorial in Washington , D.C. , to be @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Tubman .
And well-intended proposals for a national commission on monuments , such as the task force that the historian David Blight proposed for a putative Joe Biden administration , risk getting bogged down in these sterile comparisons of merit , producing little value for towns and local communities .
A progressive critique , meanwhile , questions focusing political effort on statuary instead of pressing material needs to do with economic justice , public health , policing , incarceration , and more .
This is a familiar caution , issued for instance by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ addressing the decision to remove several Confederate memorials .
As The point is not addressing the decision by New Orleans to remove several Confederate memorials , the point is not that doing so is wrong or useless : “ The city is unquestionably better for having been ridden of the monuments , ” he wrote .
But counting a statue removal as a victory risks according unearned laurels to city governments that maintain inequitable policies in other areas .
Indeed , the alacrity with which Richmond has removed the Monument Avenue statues contrasts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has meted out on protesters , along with a hefty list of progressive concerns about the administration of Stoney , the mayor .
Analogous hypocrisies have been pointed out in many cities .
Yet the temptation to dismiss the fall of the statues as merely symbolic belittles the testimony of people moved and gratified by the disappearance of objects whose presence expressed their past and present exclusion and subjugation .
It also makes less and less sense the closer one gets to the ground : to the town squares , city streets , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ monuments landed by chance , and where each plays a part in shaping property values , the allocation of public resources , and differential experiences of personal safety .
On June 5 , in the heat of the protests , the city government in Washington , D.C. , launched another trend that , in spreading across the country , has become yet another Rorschach test on questions of symbolic and spatial politics .
It painted “ BLACK LIVES MATTER ” in bright yellow traffic paint along the two-block span of 16th Street NW @ @ @ @ @ @ @ move brought applause for the pointed assertion and placement — together with a street sign designating “ Black Lives Matter Plaza ” — and derision , considering the record of Mayor Muriel Bowser and her predecessors with respect to fiscal policy , gentrification , and policing .
Numerous cities emulated D.C. , however , including New York , which has painted the same message on a street in every borough , plus one for extra measure in front of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue .
Yet this trend , two , has quickly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the input of artists and community groups , or guerrilla interventions .
In D.C. , activists appended “ DEFUND THE POLICE ” to the official message — soon removed , but not before the images were widely circulated and preserved in this moment ’ s memory .
Some cities have endorsed more assertive messages : the one on Woodward Avenue in Detroit reads “ POWER TO THE PEOPLE , ” while Newark has painted , in front of the Essex County Courthouse , “ ABOLISH WHITE SUPREMACY.
” Whatever it may say @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , each “ ground mural ” — as some are calling this new form — succeeds or fails in its particular context .
It exists in relation with the surrounding buildings and open spaces , the demographics and density of traffic , how the place is accessed and by whom , and the weave — or its absence — with other acts of spatial reclaiming that have surged alongside the protests .
Between occupations and autonomous zones , political and commemorative murals , paintings on boarded-up storefronts , a fresh wave of graffiti @ @ @ @ @ @ @ basketball courts , outdoor projections and more — plus all of their digital spread and byproducts — this has become a time of intense civic imagining , at the scale of the crisis .
It makes sense in retrospect that monuments crystallized this dynamic , leading to more topplings and removals than even advocates had imagined , Of course , there is resistance , too : In Chicago , for instance , police have been mobilized to protect a Columbus statue from protesters , prompting clashes .
But whether the monuments stay or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ changing by the action of protesters and communities .
This popular “ recontextualization ” and reclaiming goes beyond the studies , artist calls , and design competitions that many cities have held with a view to replacing or making new monuments .
Those exercises still have value , of course , if conducted with openness and true curiosity ; the Philadelphia-based studio Monument Lab , for instance , has developed an approach for rethinking monuments that builds on community consultation and allows for the idea that monuments can be radically different , or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Circle and elsewhere , though , goes beyond the question of statues .
In this summer , when the bankruptcy of the American social order has come due , it tells us there is also imagination at work , and it ’ s in the streets .

Almost as soon as the protests following the police killing of George Floyd went national, in the last weekend of May, they became, everywhere they happened, also deeply local.
In Richmond, Virginia, protesters immediately focused on Monument Avenue, the grand boulevard that runs through the elegant Fan District, and its procession of grandiose statues and memorials honoring the Confederacy. They coated the pedestal of Robert E. Lee’s equestrian statue with a mix of messages marking the national moment: remembering Floyd and others, against police in general, declaring that Black lives matter. But the visual information that sprung up at the monument site marshaled local references, too, ones particular to Richmond events and dynamics.
Quickly, an elegant wood-carved sign appeared that welcomed visitors to “Beautiful Marcus-David Peters Circle, Liberated by the People,” named for a man whom Richmond police killed in 2018. After someone removed it overnight, a new one, even bigger and more solid, was planted in its place. The designation stuck as protesters and even local journalists shared updates on social media from “MDP Circle” — an act of renaming by collective fait accompli.
Six weeks later, Monument Avenue has been utterly transformed, at a speed that neither detractors nor defenders of the statues anticipated, having been deadlocked for decades in arguments, protests, studies, and urban-design exercises — not to mention a Virginia state law that prevented cities from removing these monuments that was repealed early this year. By decision of the mayor, Levar Stoney, the city of Richmond has removed the four Confederate statues under its control — of Stonewall Jackson, Jefferson Davis, J.E.B. Stuart, and Matthew Fontaine Maury — following a cue from the protesters, who pulled down the Davis statue themselves, separating it from the bombastic, colonnaded shrine to the Confederacy of which it was the centerpiece.
The Lee statue, meanwhile, is slated to come down by decision of Virginia’s governor, Ralph Northam, though a last-ditch lawsuit filed by defenders of the statue needs to be overcome. In the meantime, however, MDP Circle has become not just the site of daily local protests but a vital national — even global — reference in this season of insurrection, as images have circulated daily of the organic culture that has sprouted there.
Black Virginians have made emotional pilgrimages to reclaim a space that for over a century was physically orchestrated to signify their exclusion and subordinacy. There have been rallies, spontaneous concerts, and innumerable spontaneous photo shoots, poignant and defiant. Nightly projections onto the statue and pedestal, by local artists Dustin Klein and Alex Criqui, have become the most powerful visual text of this restless season. The images have included political quotes and images of Floyd, other victims of police, and great figures in Black history.
The scenes from Richmond have boosted protesters elsewhere in a loop of creative emulation. They express, in ways that are inherently impossible to disentangle, both the clear set of shared national concerns that have coalesced a movement, and the city’s idiosyncratic local mix of Black politics, a grassroots-minded artist community, and vibrant punk, skater, and anti-fascist scenes.
There are similar scenes unfolding across the country, each with its own unique flavor.
The Sound and the Fury
The movement is national, a response to blanket afflictions: structural racism, police brutality, the exhaustion of the American social order, the nonstop insult of President Donald Trump, and the public health and economic horror of the Covid-19 pandemic. But every action within the movement is local.
The movement is national, but every action within the movement is local.
The emergence of statues, monuments, and public art — both magnets for protest and levers for government response, friendly or otherwise — as fulcrum points has opened up a powerful and fertile hybrid civic space. Each statue is a marker for a national apparatus of power that is now broadly understood as a system that, whatever its past promise, has failed the people. It is also an element, sometimes a focal point, in an organic local history of struggle, resistance, and political and administrative negotiation.
The combination has been catalytic. Even as many statues have been symbolically killed — some toppled by protesters, many more removed by authorities — they have come alive, activating visual, gestural, and improvisational political expression that has overflowed both the conventional terms of debate and, also, thanks to decentralized digital media, its conventional vessels.
Read Our Complete Coverage Protests for Black Lives
When protesters have done the honors, they have brought ritual care and chaotic fury. Thus, Native activists escorted the tumbling of a Christopher Columbus statue on the state Capitol grounds in St. Paul, Minnesota, with singing and drumming, transforming the event into a devotional scene. Likewise, in Los Angeles, the toppling of Junípero Serra, the brutal priest who founded the Spanish missions in California, was followed by placing onto the pedestal fruit and flower offerings.
Yet other toppling scenes have emphasized symbolic retributive violence. In one of the trans-Atlantic occurrences that have both amplified and fed back into the American wave, protesters in Bristol, U.K., pulled down a statue of the 17th-century merchant Edward Colston, then knelt on its neck, in honor of George Floyd, before tossing it in the harbor: a drowning that inescapably evokes the Middle Passage. And in Raleigh, North Carolina, a crowd pulled down two statues of Confederate soldiers from the large memorial fronting the state Capitol and dragged them in the street by ropes around their necks. The crowd left one on the courthouse steps and hung the other from a street light, the whole sequence brimming with echoes of the choreography of lynching. (A wire photo caption even used the term.) Later, the governor would order the dismantling of the whole memorial.
Protesters hang a figure pulled from the Confederate monument at the State Capitol at the intersection of Salisbury and Hargett Streets in Raleigh, N.C., on June 19, 2020. Photo: Travis Long/The News Observer/AP
Meanwhile, at least one toppling lurched from joy to horror, when in Portsmouth, Virginia, a statue that protesters were pulling off a Confederate memorial at the site of a former slave market injured a member of the crowd. And when a militia in Albuquerque, New Mexico, confronted protesters at the monument to the Spanish colonist Juan de Oñate, one of the vigilantes shot a protester, causing serious injury. (That monument, too, has now been officially dismantled.)
Statue and monument removals by public authorities have been more demure, of course, obeying reasons of politics, decorum, and safety: statues roped around the waist; equestrian figures gathered by straps under the horse’s belly and lifted by cranes; pillars and obelisks taken down in sections, revealing hitherto unknown aspects of their construction, and in at least a few cases in the South, late 19th-century time capsules. Even so, there have been decisions to make about the timing, visibility, and mise-en-scène of removals. Richmond went for broad daylight, allowing an ecstatic crowd to gather around the workers taking down the Stonewall Jackson statue. The Maury and Stuart statues also came down in public, unannounced in advance but with news spreading quickly enough, once the workers appeared, that Richmonders were able to gather for those removals too.
Elsewhere, local governments have taken down monuments quietly, in the wee hours, and in some instances, in early June, under the cover of curfews. For instance, Birmingham, Alabama, removed its 52-foot tall obelisk honoring the Confederacy, which dominated the approach to City Hall and the Jefferson County Courthouse for a century; a local reporter’s lone livestream monitored the slow process for night owls who happened to catch it. The next morning, people in Alexandria, Virginia, also found the Confederate soldier statue gone from a major Old Town intersection; the removal had already been planned, in an agreement between the city and the United Daughters of the Confederacy, its owners, but the protests accelerated its demise. And if many cities went for maximum secrecy, the removal of the Christopher Columbus statue in downtown Newark, New Jersey, while unannounced and with no media presence, took place to the sound of African drumming by musicians called on short notice, by a city official, to provide ritual rhythms.
Far From Over
The Great Statue Toppling of 2020 is far from over. In addition to landmarks in cities like Richmond, Birmingham, Raleigh, or Charleston, South Carolina — where the late 19th-century statue of the pro-slavery, antebellum Vice President John C. Calhoun is now gone, along with its 115-foot pedestal — the movement has claimed dozens of Confederate memorials in small Southern towns. Scholars who specialize in the subject are struggling to keep pace.
An armada of Columbus statues, long considered untouchable due to purported Italian American sensitivities, have been retired with little incident, toppled in Minneapolis and formally removed in a string of midsized East Coast cities, as well as a city named for the explorer himself: Columbus, Ohio. (An Andrew Jackson statue is also due for removal in Jackson, Mississippi.) In Philadelphia, the city removed its long-contested statue, fronting City Hall, of Frank Rizzo, the racist 1970s mayor. A mural celebrating Rizzo in South Philly is also gone, the now-bare wall serving, on a recent night, as an activist-organized outdoor projection screen.
A crew from Mural Arts paints over the Frank Rizzo mural on 9th Street in Philadelphia, on Sunday, June 7, 2020. Photo: David Maialetti/The Philadelphia Inquirer via AP
And while the spectacular protest-led teardowns have slowed, the once-glacial deliberative process in city councils and county boards of supervisors has sped up. It is all but ensured that more monuments will be challenged, the question put to officials who long sought to avoid the issue, and taken down.
The process is already causing small earthquakes in local civic life. In Lafayette County, Mississippi, for instance, where the five elected supervisors — all white men — opposed removing the Confederate memorial outside the county courthouse, even though the mayor of Oxford, the county seat, wants it gone. Meeting on the same day as that vote, July 6, two other Mississippi county boards went the other way: The Bolivar County board voted unanimously to remove its own memorial, and the Lowndes County board reversed itself, deciding to remove its similar monument after having voted two weeks earlier to keep it. In the space of that fortnight, racist comments by one supervisor, made in an interview with a local reporter, had caused a major furor. And the Mississippi legislature, of course, had made the historic decision to finally retire the egregious state flag, with its Confederate battle-emblem canton.
As the wave of monument removals swelled, it attracted increasing attention as an aggregate phenomenon, and less to the local specifics. This may be inevitable, to an extent. But, in going broad, much of the discussion has become unproductive, distanced from the human gestures, negotiations, and improvisations where the energy of this moment resides.
Trump and his supporters are agitating the specter of some concerted mob attack, enabled by pliant and mostly Democratic elected officials, against monuments and memorials to American historical figures in general. The Trumpists take care to omit Confederate names from their specific examples in favor of more consensual figures whose statues, in reality, face little or no credible threat. A transparent fearmongering tactic with obvious racist undertones, it signals support to defenders of Confederate memorials who are regrouping in response to events: appearing armed at monument sites, filing lawsuits, or taking out newspaper ads.
Another dismal line of discussion is the one that considers which historical figures deserve, or not, to be celebrated. Its effect is mainly to activate slippery-slope arguments that proceed in bad faith — “Where does it end?” — and to prompt bizarre, personalized interventions around particular individuals. Consider, for instance, an op-ed by a descendant of Thomas Jefferson, arguing for the Jefferson Memorial in Washington, D.C., to be in effect decommissioned and rededicated to Harriet Tubman. And well-intended proposals for a national commission on monuments, such as the task force that the historian David Blight proposed for a putative Joe Biden administration, risk getting bogged down in these sterile comparisons of merit, producing little value for towns and local communities.
A progressive critique, meanwhile, questions focusing political effort on statuary instead of pressing material needs to do with economic justice, public health, policing, incarceration, and more. This is a familiar caution, issued for instance by the scholar Adolph Reed in 2017, addressing the decision by New Orleans to remove several Confederate monuments. The point is not that doing so is wrong or useless: “The city is unquestionably better for having been ridden of the monuments,” he wrote. But counting a statue removal as a victory risks according unearned laurels to city governments that maintain inequitable policies in other areas. Indeed, the alacrity with which Richmond has removed the Monument Avenue statues contrasts with the brutality that the Richmond police has meted out on protesters, along with a hefty list of progressive concerns about the administration of Stoney, the mayor. Analogous hypocrisies have been pointed out in many cities.
Yet the temptation to dismiss the fall of the statues as merely symbolic belittles the testimony of people moved and gratified by the disappearance of objects whose presence expressed their past and present exclusion and subjugation. It also makes less and less sense the closer one gets to the ground: to the town squares, city streets, and rural roads where none of these monuments landed by chance, and where each plays a part in shaping property values, the allocation of public resources, and differential experiences of personal safety.
The Great Recontextualization
On June 5, in the heat of the protests, the city government in Washington, D.C., launched another trend that, in spreading across the country, has become yet another Rorschach test on questions of symbolic and spatial politics. It painted “BLACK LIVES MATTER” in bright yellow traffic paint along the two-block span of 16th Street NW closest to the White House. The move brought applause for the pointed assertion and placement — together with a street sign designating “Black Lives Matter Plaza” — and derision, considering the record of Mayor Muriel Bowser and her predecessors with respect to fiscal policy, gentrification, and policing.
Numerous cities emulated D.C., however, including New York, which has painted the same message on a street in every borough, plus one for extra measure in front of Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. Yet this trend, too, has quickly become localized, whether by official design, the input of artists and community groups, or guerrilla interventions. In D.C., activists appended “DEFUND THE POLICE” to the official message — soon removed, but not before the images were widely circulated and preserved in this moment’s memory. Some cities have endorsed more assertive messages: the one on Woodward Avenue in Detroit reads “POWER TO THE PEOPLE,” while Newark has painted, in front of the Essex County Courthouse, “ABOLISH WHITE SUPREMACY.”
Whatever it may say about a city’s political leadership, each “ground mural” — as some are calling this new form — succeeds or fails in its particular context. It exists in relation with the surrounding buildings and open spaces, the demographics and density of traffic, how the place is accessed and by whom, and the weave — or its absence — with other acts of spatial reclaiming that have surged alongside the protests. Between occupations and autonomous zones, political and commemorative murals, paintings on boarded-up storefronts, a fresh wave of graffiti, improvised performances, spontaneous skateparks and basketball courts, outdoor projections and more — plus all of their digital spread and byproducts — this has become a time of intense civic imagining, at the scale of the crisis.
It makes sense in retrospect that monuments crystallized this dynamic, leading to more topplings and removals than even advocates had imagined, Of course, there is resistance, too: In Chicago, for instance, police have been mobilized to protect a Columbus statue from protesters, prompting clashes. But whether the monuments stay or fall, the spaces they inhabit are changing by the action of protesters and communities.
This popular “recontextualization” and reclaiming goes beyond the studies, artist calls, and design competitions that many cities have held with a view to replacing or making new monuments. Those exercises still have value, of course, if conducted with openness and true curiosity; the Philadelphia-based studio Monument Lab, for instance, has developed an approach for rethinking monuments that builds on community consultation and allows for the idea that monuments can be radically different, or temporary.
The message from Marcus-David Peters Circle and elsewhere, though, goes beyond the question of statues. In this summer, when the bankruptcy of the American social order has come due, it tells us there is also imagination at work, and it’s in the streets.


theintercept--2020-07-19--The Coronavirus Brought Federal Prison Transfers to a Halt. Now People Are Stuck in Limbo.

Shawn Lowe arrived at the United States Penitentiary in Atlanta in early March , he was feeling pretty good about the future .
The prison was a frequent stop for people being transferred between U.S. Bureau of Prisons facilities , and though notoriously unpleasant , it was also a temporary stay .
More than seven years into a long sentence on federal drug conspiracy charges , Lowe was finally on his way to a minimum-security prison camp closer to home .
Like many who go to prison at a young age , Lowe had spent his first few years of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ After a particularly low point , he decided that he wanted to be a better son and father .
He became a devout Christian , read as many books as possible , and stacked up certificates for various programs .
After some four and a half years aimed at self-improvement , the transfer was what he had been working toward .
But on March 13 , as the country began to shut down amid the coronavirus pandemic , the BOP announced that it was stopping all movement in its tracks .
Rather than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ was stuck in a moldy , roach-infested housing unit with no idea of when he might leave .
Lowe ’ s mother , Denise Johnson , had last spoken to him on the phone in late February .
Although she did not know which prison he had been assigned , she knew it was one of two camp facilities in Minnesota , where she lives .
Either institution would allow her son more freedom of movement , as well as job and educational programming .
It would also reconnect him with his family @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on Social Security and under treatment for a blood disorder , which makes travel almost impossible .
“ I haven ’ t seen my son in eight years , ” she told me .
The next time she heard from him , it was through CorrLinks , the email system used by people incarcerated by the BOP .
He was not in Minnesota , but in Atlanta — and things were bad .
“ None of these men are getting their food , ” she remembers Lowe telling her .
“ They ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ re not getting no hygiene.
” Johnson was scared .
Lowe is young but has asthma , which she feared would make him especially vulnerable to Covid-19 .
She also worried that the lack of adequate food could weaken his immune system .
Meals were small and often served cold , he wrote .
And he did not have access to the commissary , which is critical to supplementing the paltry portions often provided to people in prison .
In one of his most recent letters , Johnson told me this spring @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that Covid-19 had gotten into the facility and raised the possibility that he might not make it out alive .
Johnson had other reasons to worry .
During our first call in April , she told me about her older son , Richard Carrillo , who had just been released from a federal prison in New York and taken a multiday Greyhound journey from Manhattan to a halfway house in Fargo , North Dakota .
In a subsequent story , I ended up focusing partly on Lowe but largely on Carrillo — the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the risks of the coronavirus in residential reentry centers .
When I got back in touch with Johnson recently , I naively expected that Lowe had likely been transferred out of Atlanta by now .
Although the coronavirus continues to spread in state and federal prisons , the BOP announced some time ago that it would begin moving thousands of recently sentenced people from detention centers into prisons .
As of May 22 , USA Today reported , an additional 7,000 people were awaiting transfer to their designated prisons .
But in a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ said Lowe was still in Atlanta .
For reasons that remain unclear , unlike his neighbors , he had not been able to make any phone calls for the whole time he had been at the facility .
His mother put money on his account , but Lowe was told his account had not been activated .
When she called the prison to complain , an employee suggested that maybe her son just didn ’ t want to speak to her .
The whole situation has taken a toll .
At a recent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ earache , Lowe weighed himself .
“ He lost 50 pounds , ” Johnson wrote in her text .
Even under ordinary circumstances , prison transfers can cause debilitating chaos and confusion for individuals in BOP custody .
The process is designed to be destabilizing and opaque ; transfers occur on very short notice — reportedly for security reasons — and families are not informed in real time where their loved ones are going or when .
Online forums like PrisonTalk contain archives dating back years showing people unable to locate their loved @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Many people who have been in federal prison describe their time spent in transit as among the worst periods of their sentence , a punitive ordeal that is as arbitrary as it is abusive .
It even has a nickname : diesel therapy .
With the coronavirus crisis magnifying long-entrenched problems at the heart of the American prison system — from medical neglect to lack of accountability for deaths in custody — Lowe is one of numerous people who fear they have fallen through the cracks during the pandemic .
Although the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the endless uncertainty and grim conditions of confinement are increasingly intolerable .
Even before the pandemic , there was no telling how long a transfer would take , or how many stops a person in custody would make along the way .
The virus has managed to make it even worse .
Lowe and his mother are not the only ones who say the holdover unit in Atlanta is a particularly dismal place to be .
“ Horrible .
Unlivable , ” was how one man , who spoke to me anonymously @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ I remember sitting there eating my dinner in my cell , and here come the roaches , ” he said .
The concrete building is old and rundown , with rust covering the showers .
“ You ’ re standing there in an unsanitary area trying to clean yourself .
And it just doesn ’ t happen.
” In a letter written more than a month after his arrival in Atlanta , Lowe said there were some 130 people in his unit .
There was black mold in the cells , he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ night .
“ Our unit has 8 showers , but only 3 of the 8 work , ” he wrote .
He had only received one bar of soap , “ delivered in two separate halves , ” he added .
“ Many of the men here are all out .
But they tell us to keep our hands clean.
” Things got even worse after the BOP announced new restrictions systemwide beginning April 1 .
Lowe and his neighbors were confined to their cells practically around the clock , while staff was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I heard an inmate complain that he was having trouble breathing and the CO told him , ‘ Good motherfucker , take short breaths , ’ ” Lowe wrote .
“ I do not know the circumstances entirely , the inmate could have possibly been full of crap … but still this illustrates the conduct of the staff at this prison.
” But perhaps the worst part was the food .
“ Just today we were served spoiled green beans with our lunch , ” he wrote .
“ This is not our @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cellmate chose to choke his down rather than be hungry.
” The BOP did not answer specific questions about people stuck in transit between prisons .
“ With respect to inmate movement generally , the BOP ’ s inmate movement nationwide is down 94 percent from this time last year , and this is directly a result of steps the BOP has taken as we have implemented our Covid-19 pandemic plan , ” spokesperson Justin Long said .
He provided links to parts of the plan , which has been rolled out in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ The tightened restrictions on April 1 placed prisons on “ enhanced modified operations ” — “ not a lockdown , ” as it has been widely described , he emphasized , “ but rather a means to minimize inmate movement , to minimize congregate gathering , and maximize social distancing among the inmate population.
” However the situation is described by the BOP , Lowe fears that after more than four months in Atlanta , he will be stuck in transit indefinitely .
“ Well , I learned that we will be here @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ” Lowe wrote in a letter Johnson received on June 5 .
“ But don ’ t hold your breath we may be here till next year maybe next summer .
I really wish I could call you mom .
I really do miss talking to you.
” Locked Down and Left Behind USP Atlanta is one of a handful of transfer hubs commonly used by the BOP to temporarily house people in transit .
Originally completed in 1902 , the prison precedes the BOP itself by nearly three decades .
By comparison @ @ @ @ @ @ @ City , which opened in 1995 , has been described as clean and modern , although that has not prevented the coronavirus from spreading .
The BOP counts 105 total cases of Covid-19 at the FTC , including one death .
At USP Atlanta , the official tally is 32 cases .
But many say this is an undercount , pointing to a 39-year-old BOP employee named Robin Grubbs who died and later tested positive for Covid-19 .
Her death has not been counted by the BOP , which has said that “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to a cause of death.
” But the prison ’ s union president told the Marshall Project that the BOP was merely trying to avoid paying benefits to Grubbs ’ s family .
“ The bureau thinks about the long-term effect of admitting something like that has happened , ” he said .
“ They try to downplay it as much as possible.
” Last month , the Marshall Project exposed how the BOP ’ s actions exacerbated the risks of the pandemic , including at holdover facilities .
“ In February and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ gaining steam , ” they wrote , “ records show over 10,000 people flying through the federal transfer center in Oklahoma City , a main transit hub , on the way to other prisons.
” In addition , despite the BOP ’ s claim on March 13 that all transfers would be stopped , people in custody continued to arrive at hot spots like FCI Elkton , spreading the virus .
Lowe arrived in Atlanta on March 3 .
Like all those awaiting trial or transfer , he was assigned to the detention @ @ @ @ @ @ @ or the penitentiary ’ s satellite camp , which have nowhere near the strict limits on phones calls , mail , commissary , and even medical services .
Although there is no available guidebook specific to holdovers at the penitentiary , the Length of Stay section of the BOP Handbook for the Oklahoma City holdover unit says that case and unit managers “ begin tracking inmates to ensure they are not unnecessarily delayed once they are at the FTC for more than 30 days.
” The handbook describes the average stay as lasting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are not housed at the FTC any longer than necessary .
… For security reasons , staff WILL NOT tell you when you are leaving.
” Holdovers are not limited to places like Atlanta or Oklahoma City .
Kimberly Wegmann first wrote to me in late April , saying that her husband , Shawn Wegmann , was stuck in a holding cell at USP Canaan , a maximum-security prison in Pennsylvania .
Like Lowe , Shawn was being transferred to a minimum-security camp when movement stopped in mid-March .
A few days after @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that Canaan was one of a handful of federal prisons that were moving people who were designated for camps into higher-security facilities .
Although there is a satellite prison camp on the grounds at USP Canaan , her husband was not allowed to be housed there because he was in transit .
One man told Forbes that the transportation holdover area was especially harsh .
“ It is cold and there was no access to phones or email , ” said the man , who spent two weeks there in quarantine before being @ @ @ @ @ @ @ saw older guys in their 50s who had been there for six weeks .
I don ’ t know how they could hold up.
” Kimberly ’ s husband had been there for nearly seven weeks when she first wrote .
Serving a 12-year sentence on federal gun charges , he had spent the past few years striving to get to a lower-security prison .
“ He has worked very hard for camp status just to be forced to be held at a USP which is max security and he is not even @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” she wrote on April 27 .
Shawn told her that he was being housed in an area that was also being used to quarantine people with Covid-19 .
If he could have access to the commissary , he could buy vitamins to help keep his immune system healthy , Kimberly said .
“ My husband may be a federal inmate but he is still a human being with rights and he is not being treated as such .
… I KNOW he is not the only one.
” Kimberly said her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ good news : After almost five years incarcerated in federal prisons hundreds of miles away , Shawn was finally going to be transferred closer to home , to the minimum-security camp at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute , Indiana .
“ I live in Frankfurt , 45 minutes north of Indianapolis , ” she said .
News of the transfer was what he had been waiting for .
“ He ’ s been doing great .
… He ’ s been programming , doing everything he can .
And working really hard @ @ @ @ @ @ @ waiting on a transfer , Shawn Wegmann did not know when exactly he would be leaving for the new facility .
In their last phone call , he had warned Kimberly that this might be their last conversation before he arrived in Oklahoma City , where he would stop on a holdover before arriving in Terre Haute .
On March 13 , prison guards came with a green bag and told him to pack his things .
Shortly afterward , he boarded a transfer bus .
But that same day , the BOP @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
Unbeknownst to Kimberly , her husband ’ s bus was redirected to a maximum-security prison even farther away .
About a week and a half later , she got a phone call from her husband .
“ He said , ‘ I can ’ t talk long … but I want to let you know I am in USP Canaan .
They ’ ve brought us here because of the lockdown.
’ ” The conditions in his unit were horrible , he told her , adding that there were some 75 guys @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more serious than his .
“ I can hear the fear in his voice , ” she said .
Kimberly said she ’ d never heard her husband sound so vulnerable and on edge .
At one point , he almost got thrown into solitary confinement for getting into a fight while trying to get to the phone , she said , which was not like him .
Although one of the only silver linings of the pandemic was that free phone calls were now available , at his unit , this had @ @ @ @ @ @ @ place , “ they get one hour to get out and they have to either take a shower , use the phone … and that is it .
So if he stays in line to talk to me , he doesn ’ t get a shower.
” Kimberly was emotional as she recounted her husband ’ s experience on a phone call in May .
On the day we spoke , right before her eight-year wedding anniversary , former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had been granted home confinement , a fact that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ indignation .
Manafort had been incarcerated at FCI Loretto , the same facility as her husband .
During her last visit with her husband , almost a year before , she had seen Manafort in the visitation area .
Her voice relaxed as she described that visit .
“ You get a hug when you come in , ” she said .
“ That was the best part … just be able to hug him.
” She bought Shawn a cherry Pepsi from the vending machine , his favorite .
As soon as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ d get him another .
Since visits are so precious , they avoided any difficult conversations .
“ If there ’ s things we need to hash out or argue about , we do that on the phone , ” she said .
That weekend , they talked about his daughter being pregnant .
“ That was a big topic of conversation because he was gon na be a grandfather for the first time.
” As with Lowe , I expected that Shawn Wegmann ’ s status would have changed in the intervening @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in June , Kimberly sounded deeply demoralized .
Nothing had changed .
She had just gotten off the phone with her husband , and he sounded as low as she ’ d ever heard him .
Meanwhile , the state of Indiana had just reopened bars and restaurants , and Kimberly had gone back to her position as a bartender .
“ We ’ ve been really busy , ” she said .
“ I think people are just so tired of being home.
” It felt good to go back to work @ @ @ @ @ @ @ being exposed to the virus and bringing it home to her father , who is in his 70s .
“ I have a camper that ’ s parked in the yard beside the barn .
… So when I come home from work , I go to the camper and strip everything off and change my clothes and wash up in the camper before I come in the house.
” But maybe the hardest part was feeling like she was living a different reality than other people .
It had always been painful @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bar , making plans to go on future dates or vacations .
“ I miss those things .
I want those things so bad.
” Now she felt like the world was moving on and leaving her husband behind — and her along with him .
The Worst I ’ ve Ever Seen A few weeks after I first spoke to Denise Johnson , two other men sent letters from USP Atlanta .
They had arrived around the same time as Lowe .
Both echoed what Lowe described .
One man said he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on for the first couple of nights he was there .
He also said he had worn the same clothes for weeks .
Food was being served in half-portions , including produce that was sometimes spoiled , he said .
Unlike Lowe , that man said his transfer was involuntary , the result of fabricated evidence that had sent him to solitary confinement for months .
“ I haven ’ t been able to see my 4 children , wife since September , ” he wrote .
The second letter contained similar descriptions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , “ no beds were available and no mattress or blanket , ” the man said .
“ It took 2 1/2 weeks to get a towel , wash rag and soap.
” He put in several requests for medical attention but received no response .
Meanwhile , the guards and trustees working in the unit were not wearing masks .
I attempted to send mail back to both men , but my letters were rejected with no explanation .
Although one of the men remains in Atlanta , the man who said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the fall has since been moved .
In a phone call in early July , his wife said he ’ d been able to hire a lawyer who helped correct the error that had gotten him wrongly disciplined in the first place .
Although his sentence is relatively brief , his journey through the system had been a nightmare even before he got stuck in Atlanta .
“ The things that he described , the condition that those guys were in — it ’ s awful , ” she said .
In one @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his mother , he told her that men were finally starting to be moved out of the prison .
“ One bus left last week and one left this week , ” he wrote a few weeks back .
The men were being tested before they were allowed to travel , he said .
But Lowe had not been tested .
“ I heard yesterday that because I ’ m going to a different region I will be stuck here til October at minimum.
” He asked her to see if she might @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the mid-Atlantic region .
“ It is bad here mom the worst I ’ ve ever seen it.
” In my last phone call with Kimberly Wegmann , on July 16 , she said she had not heard from her husband all week .
In his last letter he mentioned that some men had been placed in quarantine to prepare them for transfer .
“ If I drop off the face of the earth , ” he wrote , “ let ’ s hope I ’ m being transferred.
” She was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ running , she said .
But between the time he will spend in quarantine before his trip , to his stop in Oklahoma City , to his arrival and quarantine in Terre Haute , “ it could be a couple of months before I hear from him again .
”

When 29-year-old Shawn Lowe arrived at the United States Penitentiary in Atlanta in early March, he was feeling pretty good about the future. The prison was a frequent stop for people being transferred between U.S. Bureau of Prisons facilities, and though notoriously unpleasant, it was also a temporary stay. More than seven years into a long sentence on federal drug conspiracy charges, Lowe was finally on his way to a minimum-security prison camp closer to home.
Like many who go to prison at a young age, Lowe had spent his first few years of incarceration in and out of trouble. After a particularly low point, he decided that he wanted to be a better son and father. He became a devout Christian, read as many books as possible, and stacked up certificates for various programs. After some four and a half years aimed at self-improvement, the transfer was what he had been working toward.
But on March 13, as the country began to shut down amid the coronavirus pandemic, the BOP announced that it was stopping all movement in its tracks. Rather than continue on to his destination, Lowe was stuck in a moldy, roach-infested housing unit with no idea of when he might leave.
Lowe’s mother, Denise Johnson, had last spoken to him on the phone in late February. Although she did not know which prison he had been assigned, she knew it was one of two camp facilities in Minnesota, where she lives. Either institution would allow her son more freedom of movement, as well as job and educational programming. It would also reconnect him with his family. Johnson is raising a granddaughter while on Social Security and under treatment for a blood disorder, which makes travel almost impossible. “I haven’t seen my son in eight years,” she told me.
The next time she heard from him, it was through CorrLinks, the email system used by people incarcerated by the BOP. He was not in Minnesota, but in Atlanta — and things were bad. “None of these men are getting their food,” she remembers Lowe telling her. “They’re not getting no soap. They’re not getting no hygiene.” Johnson was scared. Lowe is young but has asthma, which she feared would make him especially vulnerable to Covid-19. She also worried that the lack of adequate food could weaken his immune system. Meals were small and often served cold, he wrote. And he did not have access to the commissary, which is critical to supplementing the paltry portions often provided to people in prison. In one of his most recent letters, Johnson told me this spring, choking back tears, Lowe said that Covid-19 had gotten into the facility and raised the possibility that he might not make it out alive.
Rather than continue on to his destination, Lowe was stuck in a moldy, roach-infested housing unit with no idea of when he might leave.
Johnson had other reasons to worry. During our first call in April, she told me about her older son, Richard Carrillo, who had just been released from a federal prison in New York and taken a multiday Greyhound journey from Manhattan to a halfway house in Fargo, North Dakota. In a subsequent story, I ended up focusing partly on Lowe but largely on Carrillo — the first in a series of articles on the risks of the coronavirus in residential reentry centers.
When I got back in touch with Johnson recently, I naively expected that Lowe had likely been transferred out of Atlanta by now. Although the coronavirus continues to spread in state and federal prisons, the BOP announced some time ago that it would begin moving thousands of recently sentenced people from detention centers into prisons. As of May 22, USA Today reported, an additional 7,000 people were awaiting transfer to their designated prisons. But in a text message in early July, Johnson said Lowe was still in Atlanta. For reasons that remain unclear, unlike his neighbors, he had not been able to make any phone calls for the whole time he had been at the facility. His mother put money on his account, but Lowe was told his account had not been activated. When she called the prison to complain, an employee suggested that maybe her son just didn’t want to speak to her. The whole situation has taken a toll. At a recent doctor’s visit to treat an earache, Lowe weighed himself. “He lost 50 pounds,” Johnson wrote in her text.
Even under ordinary circumstances, prison transfers can cause debilitating chaos and confusion for individuals in BOP custody. The process is designed to be destabilizing and opaque; transfers occur on very short notice — reportedly for security reasons — and families are not informed in real time where their loved ones are going or when. Online forums like PrisonTalk contain archives dating back years showing people unable to locate their loved ones after sentencing or during a transfer. Many people who have been in federal prison describe their time spent in transit as among the worst periods of their sentence, a punitive ordeal that is as arbitrary as it is abusive. When used as a disciplinary tactic, it even has a nickname: diesel therapy.
With the coronavirus crisis magnifying long-entrenched problems at the heart of the American prison system — from medical neglect to lack of accountability for deaths in custody — Lowe is one of numerous people who fear they have fallen through the cracks during the pandemic. Although the threat of the virus continues to loom, the endless uncertainty and grim conditions of confinement are increasingly intolerable. Even before the pandemic, there was no telling how long a transfer would take, or how many stops a person in custody would make along the way. The virus has managed to make it even worse.
Lowe and his mother are not the only ones who say the holdover unit in Atlanta is a particularly dismal place to be. “Horrible. Unlivable,” was how one man, who spoke to me anonymously to avoid retaliation, described it. “I remember sitting there eating my dinner in my cell, and here come the roaches,” he said. The concrete building is old and rundown, with rust covering the showers. “You’re standing there in an unsanitary area trying to clean yourself. And it just doesn’t happen.”
In a letter written more than a month after his arrival in Atlanta, Lowe said there were some 130 people in his unit. There was black mold in the cells, he said, and roaches came out at night. “Our unit has 8 showers, but only 3 of the 8 work,” he wrote. He had only received one bar of soap, “delivered in two separate halves,” he added. “Many of the men here are all out. But they tell us to keep our hands clean.”
Things got even worse after the BOP announced new restrictions systemwide beginning April 1. Lowe and his neighbors were confined to their cells practically around the clock, while staff was unresponsive even to sick calls. “I heard an inmate complain that he was having trouble breathing and the CO told him, ‘Good motherfucker, take short breaths,’” Lowe wrote. “I do not know the circumstances entirely, the inmate could have possibly been full of crap … but still this illustrates the conduct of the staff at this prison.”
“This is not our first encounter with spoiled food. My cellmate chose to choke his down rather than be hungry.”
But perhaps the worst part was the food. “Just today we were served spoiled green beans with our lunch,” he wrote. “This is not our first encounter with spoiled food. My cellmate chose to choke his down rather than be hungry.”
The BOP did not answer specific questions about people stuck in transit between prisons. “With respect to inmate movement generally, the BOP’s inmate movement nationwide is down 94 percent from this time last year, and this is directly a result of steps the BOP has taken as we have implemented our Covid-19 pandemic plan,” spokesperson Justin Long said. He provided links to parts of the plan, which has been rolled out in phases over the past few months. The tightened restrictions on April 1 placed prisons on “enhanced modified operations” — “not a lockdown,” as it has been widely described, he emphasized, “but rather a means to minimize inmate movement, to minimize congregate gathering, and maximize social distancing among the inmate population.”
However the situation is described by the BOP, Lowe fears that after more than four months in Atlanta, he will be stuck in transit indefinitely. “Well, I learned that we will be here for sure until sometime in July,” Lowe wrote in a letter Johnson received on June 5. “But don’t hold your breath we may be here till next year maybe next summer. I really wish I could call you mom. I really do miss talking to you.”
The U.S. Penitentiary in Atlanta on Feb. 5, 2020. Photo: John Bazemore/AP
Locked Down and Left Behind
USP Atlanta is one of a handful of transfer hubs commonly used by the BOP to temporarily house people in transit. Originally completed in 1902, the prison precedes the BOP itself by nearly three decades. By comparison, the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City, which opened in 1995, has been described as clean and modern, although that has not prevented the coronavirus from spreading. The BOP counts 105 total cases of Covid-19 at the FTC, including one death.
At USP Atlanta, the official tally is 32 cases. But many say this is an undercount, pointing to a 39-year-old BOP employee named Robin Grubbs who died and later tested positive for Covid-19. Her death has not been counted by the BOP, which has said that “there is no evidence or information relating to a cause of death.” But the prison’s union president told the Marshall Project that the BOP was merely trying to avoid paying benefits to Grubbs’s family. “The bureau thinks about the long-term effect of admitting something like that has happened,” he said. “They try to downplay it as much as possible.”
Last month, the Marshall Project exposed how the BOP’s actions exacerbated the risks of the pandemic, including at holdover facilities. “In February and early March, while the outbreak was gaining steam,” they wrote, “records show over 10,000 people flying through the federal transfer center in Oklahoma City, a main transit hub, on the way to other prisons.” In addition, despite the BOP’s claim on March 13 that all transfers would be stopped, people in custody continued to arrive at hot spots like FCI Elkton, spreading the virus.
Lowe arrived in Atlanta on March 3. Like all those awaiting trial or transfer, he was assigned to the detention center, as opposed to general population or the penitentiary’s satellite camp, which have nowhere near the strict limits on phones calls, mail, commissary, and even medical services. Although there is no available guidebook specific to holdovers at the penitentiary, the Length of Stay section of the BOP Handbook for the Oklahoma City holdover unit says that case and unit managers “begin tracking inmates to ensure they are not unnecessarily delayed once they are at the FTC for more than 30 days.” The handbook describes the average stay as lasting four to six weeks. “Inmates are not housed at the FTC any longer than necessary. … For security reasons, staff WILL NOT tell you when you are leaving.”
Holdovers are not limited to places like Atlanta or Oklahoma City. Kimberly Wegmann first wrote to me in late April, saying that her husband, Shawn Wegmann, was stuck in a holding cell at USP Canaan, a maximum-security prison in Pennsylvania. Like Lowe, Shawn was being transferred to a minimum-security camp when movement stopped in mid-March.
A few days after Kimberly’s email, Forbes reported that Canaan was one of a handful of federal prisons that were moving people who were designated for camps into higher-security facilities. Although there is a satellite prison camp on the grounds at USP Canaan, her husband was not allowed to be housed there because he was in transit. One man told Forbes that the transportation holdover area was especially harsh. “It is cold and there was no access to phones or email,” said the man, who spent two weeks there in quarantine before being sent to home confinement. “I saw older guys in their 50s who had been there for six weeks. I don’t know how they could hold up.”
“My husband may be a federal inmate but he is still a human being with rights and he is not being treated as such. … I KNOW he is not the only one.”
Kimberly’s husband had been there for nearly seven weeks when she first wrote. Serving a 12-year sentence on federal gun charges, he had spent the past few years striving to get to a lower-security prison. “He has worked very hard for camp status just to be forced to be held at a USP which is max security and he is not even being given supplies or access to commissary,” she wrote on April 27. Shawn told her that he was being housed in an area that was also being used to quarantine people with Covid-19. If he could have access to the commissary, he could buy vitamins to help keep his immune system healthy, Kimberly said. “My husband may be a federal inmate but he is still a human being with rights and he is not being treated as such. … I KNOW he is not the only one.”
Kimberly said her husband’s ordeal had started with good news: After almost five years incarcerated in federal prisons hundreds of miles away, Shawn was finally going to be transferred closer to home, to the minimum-security camp at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. “I live in Frankfort, 45 minutes north of Indianapolis,” she said. News of the transfer was what he had been waiting for. “He’s been doing great. … He’s been programming, doing everything he can. And working really hard to get camp status.”
Photo: Courtesy of Kimberly Wegmann
Like others waiting on a transfer, Shawn Wegmann did not know when exactly he would be leaving for the new facility. In their last phone call, he had warned Kimberly that this might be their last conversation before he arrived in Oklahoma City, where he would stop on a holdover before arriving in Terre Haute. On March 13, prison guards came with a green bag and told him to pack his things. Shortly afterward, he boarded a transfer bus. But that same day, the BOP announced that transfers would be temporarily suspended. Unbeknownst to Kimberly, her husband’s bus was redirected to a maximum-security prison even farther away.
About a week and a half later, she got a phone call from her husband. “He said, ‘I can’t talk long … but I want to let you know I am in USP Canaan. They’ve brought us here because of the lockdown.’” The conditions in his unit were horrible, he told her, adding that there were some 75 guys with him with convictions that were far more serious than his. “I can hear the fear in his voice,” she said.
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Kimberly said she’d never heard her husband sound so vulnerable and on edge. At one point, he almost got thrown into solitary confinement for getting into a fight while trying to get to the phone, she said, which was not like him. Although one of the only silver linings of the pandemic was that free phone calls were now available, at his unit, this had caused chaos. With the lockdown in place, “they get one hour to get out and they have to either take a shower, use the phone … and that is it. So if he stays in line to talk to me, he doesn’t get a shower.”
Kimberly was emotional as she recounted her husband’s experience on a phone call in May. On the day we spoke, right before her eight-year wedding anniversary, former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort had been granted home confinement, a fact that made her voice rise in anger and indignation. Manafort had been incarcerated at FCI Loretto, the same facility as her husband. During her last visit with her husband, almost a year before, she had seen Manafort in the visitation area.
Her voice relaxed as she described that visit. “You get a hug when you come in,” she said. “That was the best part … just be able to hug him.” She bought Shawn a cherry Pepsi from the vending machine, his favorite. As soon as he would finish one, she’d get him another. Since visits are so precious, they avoided any difficult conversations. “If there’s things we need to hash out or argue about, we do that on the phone,” she said. That weekend, they talked about his daughter being pregnant. “That was a big topic of conversation because he was gonna be a grandfather for the first time.”
“The things that he described, the condition that those guys were in — it’s awful.”
As with Lowe, I expected that Shawn Wegmann’s status would have changed in the intervening months. But during a phone call in June, Kimberly sounded deeply demoralized. Nothing had changed. She had just gotten off the phone with her husband, and he sounded as low as she’d ever heard him. Meanwhile, the state of Indiana had just reopened bars and restaurants, and Kimberly had gone back to her position as a bartender. “We’ve been really busy,” she said. “I think people are just so tired of being home.”
It felt good to go back to work, she said. But she feared being exposed to the virus and bringing it home to her father, who is in his 70s. “I have a camper that’s parked in the yard beside the barn. … So when I come home from work, I go to the camper and strip everything off and change my clothes and wash up in the camper before I come in the house.”
But maybe the hardest part was feeling like she was living a different reality than other people. It had always been painful to see couples out together at the bar, making plans to go on future dates or vacations. “I miss those things. I want those things so bad.” Now she felt like the world was moving on and leaving her husband behind — and her along with him.
The Worst I’ve Ever Seen
A few weeks after I first spoke to Denise Johnson, two other men sent letters from USP Atlanta. They had arrived around the same time as Lowe. Both echoed what Lowe described. One man said he did not have a mattress to sleep on for the first couple of nights he was there. He also said he had worn the same clothes for weeks. Food was being served in half-portions, including produce that was sometimes spoiled, he said. Unlike Lowe, that man said his transfer was involuntary, the result of fabricated evidence that had sent him to solitary confinement for months. “I haven’t been able to see my 4 children, wife since September,” he wrote.
The second letter contained similar descriptions. When he first arrived at Atlanta, “no beds were available and no mattress or blanket,” the man said. “It took 2 1/2 weeks to get a towel, wash rag and soap.” He put in several requests for medical attention but received no response. Meanwhile, the guards and trustees working in the unit were not wearing masks.
I attempted to send mail back to both men, but my letters were rejected with no explanation. Although one of the men remains in Atlanta, the man who said he had not seen his family since the fall has since been moved. In a phone call in early July, his wife said he’d been able to hire a lawyer who helped correct the error that had gotten him wrongly disciplined in the first place. Although his sentence is relatively brief, his journey through the system had been a nightmare even before he got stuck in Atlanta. “The things that he described, the condition that those guys were in — it’s awful,” she said.
In one of Lowe’s last emails to his mother, he told her that men were finally starting to be moved out of the prison. “One bus left last week and one left this week,” he wrote a few weeks back. The men were being tested before they were allowed to travel, he said. But Lowe had not been tested. “I heard yesterday that because I’m going to a different region I will be stuck here til October at minimum.” He asked her to see if she might help him get transferred to a prison in the mid-Atlantic region. “It is bad here mom the worst I’ve ever seen it.”
In my last phone call with Kimberly Wegmann, on July 16, she said she had not heard from her husband all week. In his last letter he mentioned that some men had been placed in quarantine to prepare them for transfer. “If I drop off the face of the earth,” he wrote, “let’s hope I’m being transferred.” She was hopeful that things were finally up and running, she said. But between the time he will spend in quarantine before his trip, to his stop in Oklahoma City, to his arrival and quarantine in Terre Haute, “it could be a couple of months before I hear from him again.”


theintercept--2020-07-18--What a Difference a Cycle Makes: Pelosi Statement on Jamaal Bowman Compared to AOC Tells a Tale of T

What a Difference a Cycle Makes: Pelosi Statement on Jamaal Bowman Compared to AOC Tells a Tale of Two Years

What a difference a cycle makes .
This time around , the group Justice Democrats , which had backed Ocasio-Cortez , put its energy behind Jamaal Bowman , taking on Rep. Eliot Engel in a neighboring district to Ocasio-Cortez ’ s .
Engel had been in Congress a decade longer than Crowley and was a real chair , sitting atop the House Foreign Affairs Committee .
On Friday , after mail-in bailouts had been counted , Bowman was officially declared the winner of the primary .
Pelosi ’ s reaction was markedly different .
I salute Chairman Crowley for a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of New York .
I congratulate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on her victory .
As Chairman of the House Democratic Caucus , Joe Crowley brought principled , unifying and forward-looking leadership to the historic challenges of the Trump Administration .
Our Caucus has been strengthened by his chairmanship , and by Chairman Crowley ’ s relentless determination to defend the inclusive America symbolized by the Statue of Liberty .
Chairman Joe Crowley has been an unwavering champion for America ’ s working families for almost two decades .
To know Congressman Crowley is to know @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Bronx , and the joy and effectiveness he brought to serve as their voice in the Congress .
Crowley was not the chair of a major committee , but held the title of chair of the House Democratic Caucus , an honorific she used in her farewell note .
The statement itself would not generate significant news but would send a signal to other House Democrats about how she was thinking about his loss .
It included only a passing reference to the future congresswoman in the final line .
The day @ @ @ @ @ @ @ his primary to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez , Nancy Pelosi , the top Democrat in the House , issued her statement on the affair , solemnly titled , “ Pelosi Statement on Chairman Joe Crowley .
” The first subtle change is in the headline .
Where the previous statement centered Crowley , the new one moves into neutral : “ Pelosi Statement on the NY-16 Primary Election.
” Pelosi ’ s words are carefully chosen and watched closely by her Democratic colleagues in the House as a gauge of the direction of the party @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the so-called Squad last year as just “ four people , ” she effectively signaled how seriously she took their challenge .
The warm note sent Saturday morning to Bowman — who has promised to “ cause trouble for the status quo in Washington ” — sends an entirely different signal .
Like with Crowley , her statement on the latest race fairly begins with kind words toward her vanquished colleague : Chairman Eliot Engel has been a powerful force for good in America in his three decades of service in the Congress @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Congress and country at the helm of the Foreign Affairs Committee , where he has been masterful in his work keeping the American people safe at home while protecting our interests and advancing our values abroad .
And serving as a Senior Member of the Energy and Commerce Committee , he has strengthened millions of families ’ health , financial security and well-being .
But from there , however , she pivots to Bowman .
Jamaal Bowman has run an electrifying campaign that has stirred the Bronx and Westchester communities with his @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
As an educator and progressive advocate , he has been a voice for the voiceless who brings great urgency to the fight to lift up working families .
She concludes with a similar refrain to her Crowley statement , but adds a welcoming note that was not offered to Ocasio-Cortez .
That doesn ’ t mean that Bowman and the Squad will be welcomed with open arms next term .
A “ congressional source ” went to the New York Post with an entirely different tone , using Bowman ’ s win @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at Ocasio-Cortez .
“ People keep writing positive articles about her because it gets clicks .
But what ’ s the reality ?
What has she delivered ?
So much has been written about the Green New Deal… did it ever become law ?
” he said .
“ She is good at tweeting , not legislating.
” The source went on to dunk on Ocasio-Cortez for losses in primaries by Morgan Harper and Jessica Cisneros , candidates she endorsed for Congress in Ohio and Texas , respectively , though Ocasio-Cortez hadn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ candidates have gotten crushed from Ohio to Texas .
Bowman and Jones are excellent candidates who would have won without her endorsement , ” the source claimed .
Jones refers to Mondaire Jones , who primaried Rep. Nita Lowey , who retired rather than run for reelection .
Jones then won the open primary .
Whoever the Post ’ s quoted source is , Rep. Hakeem Jeffries , D-N.Y. , who took over Crowley ’ s role a chair of the caucus , has sounded a similar note before .
After Harper ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Jeffries took to Twitter :

The day after New York Rep. Joe Crowley lost his primary to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Nancy Pelosi, the top Democrat in the House, issued her statement on the affair, solemnly titled, “Pelosi Statement on Chairman Joe Crowley.”
Crowley was not the chair of a major committee, but held the title of chair of the House Democratic Caucus, an honorific she used in her farewell note. The statement itself would not generate significant news but would send a signal to other House Democrats about how she was thinking about his loss. It included only a passing reference to the future congresswoman in the final line.
Her full statement:
Chairman Joe Crowley has been an unwavering champion for America’s working families for almost two decades. To know Congressman Crowley is to know his fierce pride in representing Queens and the Bronx, and the joy and effectiveness he brought to serve as their voice in the Congress. As Chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, Joe Crowley brought principled, unifying and forward-looking leadership to the historic challenges of the Trump Administration. Our Caucus has been strengthened by his chairmanship, and by Chairman Crowley’s relentless determination to defend the inclusive America symbolized by the Statue of Liberty. I salute Chairman Crowley for a formidable legacy of achievement for the people of New York. I congratulate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on her victory.
What a difference a cycle makes. This time around, the group Justice Democrats, which had backed Ocasio-Cortez, put its energy behind Jamaal Bowman, taking on Rep. Eliot Engel in a neighboring district to Ocasio-Cortez’s. Engel had been in Congress a decade longer than Crowley and was a real chair, sitting atop the House Foreign Affairs Committee. On Friday, after mail-in bailouts had been counted, Bowman was officially declared the winner of the primary. Pelosi’s reaction was markedly different.
The first subtle change is in the headline. Where the previous statement centered Crowley, the new one moves into neutral: “Pelosi Statement on the NY-16 Primary Election.”
Pelosi’s words are carefully chosen and watched closely by her Democratic colleagues in the House as a gauge of the direction of the party’s politics. When she slighted the so-called Squad last year as just “four people,” she effectively signaled how seriously she took their challenge. The warm note sent Saturday morning to Bowman — who has promised to “cause trouble for the status quo in Washington” — sends an entirely different signal.
Like with Crowley, her statement on the latest race fairly begins with kind words toward her vanquished colleague:
Chairman Eliot Engel has been a powerful force for good in America in his three decades of service in the Congress. His leadership has strengthened our Caucus, Congress and country at the helm of the Foreign Affairs Committee, where he has been masterful in his work keeping the American people safe at home while protecting our interests and advancing our values abroad. And serving as a Senior Member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, he has strengthened millions of families’ health, financial security and well-being.
But from there, however, she pivots to Bowman.
Jamaal Bowman has run an electrifying campaign that has stirred the Bronx and Westchester communities with his message of hope, justice and progress. As an educator and progressive advocate, he has been a voice for the voiceless who brings great urgency to the fight to lift up working families.
She concludes with a similar refrain to her Crowley statement, but adds a welcoming note that was not offered to Ocasio-Cortez.
I salute Chairman Engel for his distinguished service, which has made a difference for America. I congratulate Jamaal Bowman on his victory and look forward to welcoming him to Congress.
That doesn’t mean that Bowman and the Squad will be welcomed with open arms next term. A “congressional source” went to the New York Post with an entirely different tone, using Bowman’s win as another opportunity to take a swipe at Ocasio-Cortez. “People keep writing positive articles about her because it gets clicks. But what’s the reality? What has she delivered? So much has been written about the Green New Deal… did it ever become law?” he said. “She is good at tweeting, not legislating.”
The source went on to dunk on Ocasio-Cortez for losses in primaries by Morgan Harper and Jessica Cisneros, candidates she endorsed for Congress in Ohio and Texas, respectively, though Ocasio-Cortez hadn’t actually endorsed Harper. “Her candidates have gotten crushed from Ohio to Texas. Bowman and Jones are excellent candidates who would have won without her endorsement,” the source claimed. Jones refers to Mondaire Jones, who primaried Rep. Nita Lowey, who retired rather than run for reelection. Jones then won the open primary.
Whoever the Post’s quoted source is, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., who took over Crowley’s role a chair of the caucus, has sounded a similar note before. After Harper’s loss to Rep. Joyce Beatty, Jeffries took to Twitter:
Meltdown? Not us. Congrats @JoyceBeatty on a decisive 36 point (??????) victory in Ohio’s democratic congressional primary! Up next @VoteYvette @LacyClayMO1 #ClarkeForCongress #StayWithClay. They started this fight. We will finish it ??????. — Hakeem Jeffries (@hakeemjeffries) April 29, 2020
Cori Bush faces Rep. Lacy Clay in Missouri in a rematch of her 2018 race on August 4.