Vandals targeted a trail at Jennie Dean Park, spray painting “BLM” and “FTP.”
The acronyms represent Black Lives Matter and a phrase showing disrespect to police officers, respectively. Those two markings, as well as a third, “I can’t breathe,” the last words from George Floyd, a Minneapolis man who was killed at the hands of a police officer last year, were found on two of the utility boxes on a trail inside the park.
A PLN reader, who found, photographed, and reported the vandalism to the city, sent us the photos you’re looking at in this post. She reported it on June 2, and it took the city a matter of days to remove it.
A Manassas City spokeswoman couldn’t provide information on when or who removed the markings.
The markings were found about 1,500 feet from a nearly $200,000 bronze statue of Jennie Dean unveiled last fall.
Dean, who was born a slave in Prince William County in 1848 and freed after the Civil War in 1865, founded the Manassas Industrial School at the site on which her statue stands to provide blacks a post-secondary education.
The statue in Jennie Dean Park memorializes the educator, as does an elementary school next to the park that’s named for the former slave.
The tipster who reported the vandalism said it was odd that those who would support BLM would spray paint a park meant to memorialize a former slave.
“They really need to learn their history,” she wrote in an email.
Jennie Dean Memorial Park is located at 9601 Wellington Road.
Fast forward to this past weekend, to when vandals poured paint on a statue of Stonewall Jackson at the Manassas Battlefield National Park. This was the second time in as many years that the statue had been vandalized.
The statue sits on hallowed ground, memorializing a Virginian who fought for the confederacy and is considered one of the greatest military generals of all time.
