San Francisco Frontiers - Did George Floyd protesters miss their moment for change?

But five years on, the protesters are gone and an iconic monument outside the White House has been erased, leaving many to wonder if the movement blew its chance for historic change by failing to win over the American public.

"It's very easy to wear the T-shirt, utter the slogan, but then you looked at what they were asking for," Yohuru Williams, who runs the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St Thomas, told AFP.

Despite widespread revulsion at racism and police brutality in the wake of Floyd's May 2020 death, many turned away when BLM activists broadened their message to calling for the defunding of law enforcement.

National support for the Black Lives Matter movement is now 52 percent, according to Pew Research, down 15 percentage points since June 2020, a month after police officer Derek Chauvin killed Floyd during an arrest in Minneapolis.

Initially, Floyd's death was hailed as a catalyst for a national reckoning similar to the 1960s civil rights movement.

Protests, some turning into riots, spread across the country -- right up to the gates of the White House, where Donald Trump was serving his first term.

Pent-up energy from Covid lockdowns fed the anger, which coalesced around BLM, until then a loose organization founded in 2013 to protest racially motivated violence.

Activists soon widened their focus to systemic racism, with monuments of slave owners removed and some companies investing in diversity initiatives to support ethnic minorities.

- Missed opportunity -

Despite the ambition, Williams said that BLM has achieved "very little."

"The moral clarity of 2020 has not translated into enough political courage," Phillip Solomon, a professor of African-American Studies and Psychology at Yale University, told AFP.

The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which proposed law enforcement reforms, including nationwide bans on dangerous chokeholds during arrests, has failed to pass US lawmakers.

Solomon said Floyd's killing –- he called it a "lynching" -– opened an opportunity for change that was missed and is now facing a backlash.

The election of Trump to a second term -- despite his racially charged rhetoric and heavy support from far-right figures –- reflects deep-rooted tensions, he said.

"I think this moment is a microcosm of America," Solomon added.

Race inequality has long sparked protests in the United States, where segregation only legally ended in the 1960s after a relentless campaign of marches and civil disobedience.

Floyd's death came in the context of dozens of other high-profile instances of police brutality against Black people –- something that smartphones and social media can now rapidly document and share.

- 'Reversed with a vengeance' -

There have been police reforms in some states primarily focused on limiting the amount of force officers can use, as well as local programs to send unarmed responders instead of police to selected callouts.

However, many say these measures are insufficient.

Medaria Arradondo -– serving as the first Black police chief of Minneapolis when Floyd died -– told AFP he was worried about the "grave consequences" of failing to enact more reforms.

"I hope and pray that we as a nation are not sleepwalking our way into the next critical crisis," he said.

Civil rights group the National Urban League this month published a report warning that marginalized communities have been "pushed deeper into survival mode" after Floyd's death.

League president Marc Morial said at a conference that steps to address racial injustices have "been reversed with a vengeance."

Trump's Justice Department has axed all outstanding civil rights investigations from the outgoing Joe Biden administration, ended police accountability agreements, and cracked down on diversity hiring.

Some of Trump's more extreme supporters have gone as far as calling for Chauvin to be pardoned.

But Arradondo said he remains optimistic.

"History has shown we make incremental change,” he said, “We're going to have a lot of hard work ahead of us, but I believe we will get there."

M.Gonzalez--SFF