On Saturday (July 4), residents of Martinez, California painted a yellow Black Lives Matter mural on the street outside of the county courthouse after receiving permission from the city.
Hours later, a white man and a woman, dressed in Trump gear, painted right over it.
A video of the couple shows the woman rolling black paint over the mural. One resident, who was filming the vandalism, asked what they were are doing. Another can be heard asking, “What is wrong with you?”
The white man, who was also filming the whole ordeal, claimed that racism is a lie while calling the mural itself racism.
“There is no racism,” he said. “There is no oppression. It’s a leftist lie.”
They left before they could finish tarnishing the Black Lives Matter painting, however. Martinez Police are now in search of the pair.
“The City of Martinez values tolerance and the damage to the mural was divisive and hurtful,” Martinez Police Department said in a statement. “Please help us identify those that are responsible for this crime, so they can be held accountable for their actions.”
According to an artist who helped paint the mural, the initiative was in direct response to white power fliers that were found around the city earlier in the week.
“I think that this is an indication of how much power white supremacy actually has,” Martinez resident Tatiana Ray told ABC7News. “The fact that even having something on the street for one hour, they couldn’t even tolerate that. You know, it was such a threat to have anybody else’s concerns represented by the city and represented by the community.”
Today (July 5), the mural was fixed.
“It appeared that the couple came to the mural with cans of paint and a roller with the specific purpose of vandalizing over the mural,” the MPD said. “The community spent a considerable amount of time painting this mural only to have the suspects destroy it by dumping and rolling paint over part of the message.”