Lafayette Park near White House: A soapbox for social unrest
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Trump administration’s use of smoke bombs and pepper balls to rout civil rights demonstrators from Lafayette Park near the White House has emboldened protesters and added a new chapter to the site’s storied history as soapbox for social and political unrest.
“Gas us. Shoot us. Beat us. We’re still here,” said a sign hung on the tall black fence erected to wall off the park after law enforcement officers clashed with demonstrators protesting the death of George Floyd, a black man who died in police custody in Minneapolis.
Lia Poteet, a 28-year-old resident of Washington, D.C., who was injured during the demonstration, has already returned to the area to demonstrate again.
“I’m still going back to Lafayette Square because it is the epicenter of our democracy,” Poteet said.
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The park, just steps from Trump’s front yard, was where an enslaved woman named Alethia Browning Tanner used $1,400 she earned from selling vegetables in the park to buy her freedom in 1810. Back then, the 7-acre plot was called the President’s Park. In 1824, it was landscaped and named for Marquis de Lafayette, a French general who was friends with George Washington and fought in the Revolutionary War.
Civil War soldiers camped there and hung their laundry to dry on the park’s statue of Andrew Jackson. Women protested for the right to vote in the 1910s. In the 1940s, women in dresses and hats peacefully protested against lynchings. “Lynching in America is a disgrace. Must it Continue?” said one sign.
In past decades, the park has been the stage for protesters decrying wars in Vietnam and Iraq. Demonstrators have rallied for and against the Equal Rights Amendment, and fought for gay and lesbian rights.
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