San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
LA JOLLA FAMILIES JOIN TOGETHER WITH UNITY MESSAGE
People gather to create chalk art, but some take offense
Colorful images of flowers, rainbows, heart-shaped balloons and ocean waves — rendered in chalk — adorn a La Jolla bike path, accompanied by phrases that read: “Waves of unity,” “Silence is violence” and “Diversity is our future.”
The drawings and messages were created by a group of at least 40 parents and children from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds. In the months since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and the protests against police violence that followed, the group members have poured their emotions onto the pavement.
The messages, they said, promote love and unity — and their support of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Chalk Up events, as the group calls them, were held over the Fourth of July and Labor Day weekends. But not everyone has welcomed the results. Some La Jolla residents complained through the city’s Get it Done app about the images drawn on the bike path, reporting them
to the city as “offensive.”
City workers power washed them away.
City spokesman Anthony Santacroce told the La Jolla Light that the chalk drawings were considered offensive by those who filed the complaints, and the city only removed them as part of normal operating procedures because they were in the right of way.
“In keeping with the level of service residents have come to expect from the the Get It Done platform, city crews respond quickly to all reports of graffiti on streets, bike paths and other rightof-way areas,” Santacroce said via email. “From a purely operational perspective, any markings that might compromise safety and visibility on facilities like this or have the potential to wash out and pollute our environment meet the criteria for removal.”
Undeterred, the group was back on the bike path last week, sharing their messages in chalk.
“We envision our neighborhood as an inclusive community... we wanted to invite the community to use art to have a conversation about equity,” said La Jolla resident Ruth Leivers, one of the people who organized the Chalk Up events. “Our children are trying to process what they’re seeing in the world around them as our nation grapples with what the New York Times says is maybe the largest social movement in our history, which is the movement for Black lives.”
Leivers, a married mother of three and former elementary school teacher, said art has become a vector for an ongoing conversation about the social justice movement, and she organized the Chalk Up events as a way for children to process their feelings about it.
“Our children know that
Black lives matter, they’re confused as to why the country is so torn up about this,” said Leivers, who is biracial with a Trinidadian mother and English father. “We wanted to create a safe way for them and their parents and the community to engage in this dialogue.”
Leivers said that since the Chalk Up events started, her kids have told her they feel like they’re making a positive impact in their community. She said her 17-yearold daughter told her that recent news events combined with the Chalk Ups have helped localize social justice events for her friends, helping them to realize racism happens here, as well.
Mira Sanchez Costello, another La Jolla mom involved with the events, said children are not only reacting to what they see on the news, but they’re also learning about social justice issues on social media.
“These kids, they watch Tiktok and you’d be surprised about the messages that they’re internalizing,” Sanchez Costello said. “... I wanted to give my daughter another alternative to express herself through through art and through chalk.”
Sonia Teder-moore of La Jolla said providing a platform for their children’s voices to be heard is an important part of teaching them about the democratic process.
“As a parent, these are hard times in which to find places where kids can have hope and feel like they can really be a part of this process of democracy so they have some sense of agency and feel like we’re going forward,” she said.
Teder-moore, who identifies as Caucasian, said she and 12-year-old daughter Kai participated in a march in June from La Jolla Cove to Windansea beach to show support for the Black Lives Matter movement. Before the march, Kai made signs with messages that read, “Let’s be kind to each other,” that she hung outside the family home.
Later, Teder-moore said she saw a man ripping the signs down from her fence. She said she asked the man to stop, but he continued, yelling at her before walking away with the signs.
“When I shared that with our friends and community, they were all just as shocked as I was that this could happen in what we think of as a very accepting community,” Teder-moore said.
She found out later that Leivers — whose youngest daughter is one of Kai’s schoolmates — was organizing a chalk drawing event and wanted to get involved.
“(Ruth) brought us together, creating this Chalk Up event and creating an opportunity for kids and families to come and share their support to the wider conversation that’s happening across the country,” Tedermoore said. “Kids were sharing their ideas and dreams and hopes and support and when it was washed away again, we were incredibly shocked.”
The parents involved with the Chalk Up events don’t seem ready to give up on the project anytime soon.
After the first event, Sanchez Costello said she read hurtful comments about the art on Nextdoor, where some users referred to the drawings as graffiti and called Black Lives Matter a “fascist group.”
“It just was so hurtful reading that. Somebody wrote on the sidewalk that ‘You can’t can’t erase hate,’ and when you think about power washing, how ironic is the word ‘power washing?’ “Sanchez Costello said. “I figured if they’re going to keep washing away the chalk, I’ll just keep buying more.”
For now, the images on the bike path remain, although they’ve faded a bit over the course of the week, and Santacroce said there are no immediate plans to remove them.
“Given its finite resources, the City focuses on the most egregious examples of graffiti when it prioritizes removal projects,” Santacroce said via email. “The City doesn’t consider the chalk drawing on this particular bike path to be a priority at this time and there are no plans for removal.”
Leivers said she will continue to organize the Chalk Up events if the city keeps washing the drawings away.
“Art has shown that it works, it gives children a way to safely wrestle with a really big and sometimes disturbing issues,” Leivers said.
“Black boys do live here,” she continued. “We are riding the wave to equality and equity. Protest is patriotic.”