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Black woman crushed BLM mural at Trump Tower

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A conservative activist just handed BLM’s newest mural its third paint job in nine days — and this time an NYPD officer ended up in the hospital.

Saturday afternoon on Fifth Avenue, the yellow Black Lives Matter lettering painted outside Trump Tower got doused in black paint again — the third defacement since the mural went up on July 9. This time it wasn’t anonymous. Cameras caught Bevelyn Beatty, a 29-year-old conservative Christian activist, and an associate rolling black paint straight across the letters in broad daylight, and the confrontation that followed sent a police officer to Bellevue Hospital.

• Bevelyn Beatty, 29, and Edmee Chavannes, 39, poured black paint onto the mural and smeared it with paint rollers Saturday afternoon, July 18, 2020, outside Trump Tower.
• An NYPD officer who tried to intervene slipped on the wet paint and was hospitalized at Bellevue with head and arm injuries, listed in stable condition; both women were arrested at the scene.
• The mural, completed July 9, had already been vandalized twice before — once with red paint, once with blue — making Saturday’s incident the third targeting in nine days.

The Confrontation on Fifth Avenue

Video of the incident, first amplified by Brandon Tatum’s “The Officer Tatum” channel, shows Beatty in a ‘#JesusMatters’ T-shirt pouring black paint directly onto the mural’s yellow letters while Chavannes worked a roller across the pavement. Beatty shouted slogans as onlookers gathered, including “Refund our police,” “De Blasio doesn’t care about Black people,” and “We’re taking our country back.” The scene escalated quickly once officers moved in to stop the pair, and the wet, slick paint became a hazard of its own — the responding officer went down hard enough to require hospitalization.

Both Beatty and Chavannes were taken into custody on scene. It’s the same stretch of pavement that’s now been hit three separate times in the nine days since the city painted it, following earlier vandalism with red and blue paint that never drew this level of attention or arrests.

Beatty’s Case Against the Movement

Beatty has built a public profile as an outspoken critic of BLM, framing the mural itself as a symbol of exactly what she opposes. She argued the movement thrives on grievance rather than solutions, and that painting over the letters was a deliberate rebuttal — not vandalism for its own sake, in her telling, but a protest against a protest.

“We’re taking our country back.”

She’s tied her activism explicitly to her faith, arguing that the gospel — not political organizing — is the actual answer to the divisions BLM claims to address. Her shirt slogan and her chants Saturday weren’t incidental; they were the whole pitch, delivered in real time while she and Chavannes worked the rollers across the street.

A City Already Strained Over Policing

The incident lands in a city where NYPD morale and funding have already been front-page fights for weeks. Mayor Bill de Blasio has moved to slash $1 billion from the NYPD budget as violent crime surges, and rank-and-file frustration has been visible enough that a precinct commander quit in protest over lack of support from officials. An officer getting hurt trying to break up a paint fight over a mural is a small, strange footnote against that backdrop, but it’s the kind of incident that both sides of the mural debate are already using to make their point.

Beatty’s specific line — “De Blasio doesn’t care about Black people” — was aimed directly at that fight, tying her opposition to the mural into the broader argument over police funding rather than treating it as a standalone stunt.

Third Time in Nine Days

What makes Saturday different from the two earlier paint jobs isn’t the black paint itself — it’s that this time there were named suspects, an arrest, and an injured officer, turning a symbolic vandalism story into a criminal case. The mural’s short history now reads as a running scoreboard: red paint, blue paint, then black paint applied on camera by two women who wanted to be seen doing it.

Beatty and Chavannes were both taken into custody Saturday afternoon, and with an officer hospitalized, the case is no longer just about a defaced street painting — it’s a criminal matter with an actual victim, which is a very different problem for whoever ends up prosecuting it.