Photo Courtesy Ilana Israel Samuels
Every day for nearly a week, Manette Sharick and her 3-year-old daughter, Zhuri, drew “Black Lives Matter” in chalk across the sidewalk outside their home in Concord, California.
But every time they wrote the message, they woke up the next morning to find that the word Black, and only that word, had been erased.
“I just wanted to teach my daughter that Black lives matter, Black culture matters, Black communities matter, and that we are the movement for Black lives,” Sharick, who is Black, told CNN. “I was shocked that someone could be purposefully doing this. It hurt a lot, it made me extremely upset.”
Following three days of what she called “overwhelming frustration,” Sharick wrote the message in direct view of her security camera.
That’s when she saw a man she says she never met and only knows as Jim, pouring water over the message. In a video Sharick recorded on her phone after running out to confront him, the man tells her that he will continue to remove the word “as long as she keeps on doing this.”
“I was only pouring across the word Black because I believe that all lives matter,” Jim told CNN affiliate KGO. “I don’t care what nationality, sexual orientation or any of that, we are all human beings.”
He added that he erased the “Black” from Black Lives Matter because he felt in the beginning of the movement “it had good intentions” but now the phrase has been “hijacked.”
CNN could not reach Jim for comment because he has not released his last name.
For the full story, visit CNN.com/US-News.
