In mid-2020, cornered by protests, the Trump administration ordered the erection of a metal barrier preventing protesters from approaching the White House. The fence became one of the symbols of popular fury against his tenure – and of how cornered the then American president was.
The protesters, who have been on the streets for months demanding an end to police violence against blacks, were not intimidated. They used the grid as a support to expose hundreds of posters with some of the slogans of the Black Lives Matters movement. Black lives matter, in Portuguese.
In January 2021, with the inauguration of Joe Biden and the deflation of the protests, the government announced that it would remove the barriers. It was excellent news for the protesters, except that without the grille, there wouldn’t be any posters either; your messages would disappear.
The idea bothered Nadine Seiler, 56. This immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago had spent months in front of the White House ranting against the government. She had taken it upon herself to organize the posters and protect them from vandalism by some of Trump’s supporters.
He did this voluntarily, without receiving anything. He put aside his paid job and, in doing so, was late paying his mortgage. It seemed that, suddenly, everything would have been in vain.
It was not. Seiler methodically photographed the fence, noting where each poster was taped. Then he collected the collection — more than a thousand posters — and took it all to a warehouse. She thus became the unexpected archivist of an important moment in the history of the United States. Museums across the country have already shown interest in this popular treasure, and recently the iconic Library of Congress included some of the posters in a permanent virtual collection.
One of the posters displayed says, for example, that “white silence is violence”. Another prints the phrase “black lives matter” over the US flag. A third poster reminds the public that “caring” for the black population is just the bare minimum.
The story of this impromptu archivist is a sequence of instinctive decisions and unexpected events. Seiler worked as a professional housekeeper, helping people organize their homes. She decided to join the protests because she felt, first hand, the importance of that movement. “The history of this country is one of police brutality, of dehumanization of the black population.”
“I know that, because I’m black, I can have the same end as Breonna Taylor”, he says, mentioning the young black woman killed by police in March 2020. It was the death of Taylor and others – especially George Floyd – that infuriated the country in those months. Floyd was murdered in May 2020 by then-police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on his neck for nearly ten minutes. “I wasn’t thinking of the story with a capital letter,” Seiler says. “I just wanted to be in that place.”
She’d noticed, on her daily visits to the railing in front of the White House, that the place was in dire need of some tidying up—just her talent. “I wanted to make sure the posters were organized, clean, the messages were clear.” She also went on to protect the fence from pro-Trump protesters who sometimes appeared to rip up posters. “They didn’t want our messages blocking the view of their ‘Messiah’ home,” she says.
It’s not that she behaved like the owner of the posters. If anyone wanted to take one of the messages home, Seiler wasn’t opposed. Many people have done this over the months of protest. What they couldn’t, she says, is disrespect the protesters’ struggle and try to silence — as usual — their voice.
The Caribbean woman also witnessed, for months, as Americans came from all corners of the country to place their messages on the metal barrier. This devotion convinced her even more of the need to organize the collection. “I wanted to protect those voices,” she says. Voices, including, of immigrants like her — people who sometimes do not speak up for fear of being deported.
Seiler began to divide the posters by subject. She gathered, for example, all the feminist messages in one corner. In another, the words “I can’t breathe”, in reference to Floyd’s murder. She made the posters tell stories to visitors. And the grid ended up becoming a tourist spot in Washington, later reaching social media.
The idea of ​​collecting those posters started even before the news of the removal of the grid. A representative from the Library of Congress started going to the protests and offering her help. Other museums have contacted but not sent representatives due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
After the barrier came down and Seiler became the guardian of those posters, a network of activists and professionals began to mobilize to preserve that history. The Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore offered its scanner. Every week, the activist drives more than 70 kilometers to deliver the posters that will be digitized. Some files were sent to the Washington Public Library. Others went to Howard University, a traditional bastion of black academia.
All this work is voluntary, done in parallel with housekeeping. She even pays the costs of the deposit and travel to Baltimore — she has received, at most, donations from some mission enthusiasts — while trying to regularize her boletos.
Seiler is now putting together a committee of people to decide the future of the rest of the collection. The idea is to spread the message as much as possible. But she doesn’t want, at the same time, to donate posters to pompous institutions that will keep them in the basement, without ever showing them.
“I want to tell our story, so that people understand why we are fighting,” he says.
