BALTIMORE — Shortly after a Sunday service, a man walking down York Road hopped up on the ledge where the church kept their Black Lives Matter banner.
He then ripped it down and stomped on it before leaving.
"It's disappointing, it's discouraging, it's sad that somebody would do it," said Tom Harris, the pastor at Govans Presbyterian Church.
This is the second time someone has vandalized the banner since it was put up in 2020.
The first time it was slashed with a knife and put back together by a church member.
Now, it sits in the sanctuary tattered and broken.
"We're absolutely going to put the Black Lives Matter banner back up. We're going to use wooden posts this time instead of metal stakes so it'll be harder to vandalize," said Harris.
"We're going to put it perpendicular to York road this time so it can be seen going in both directions and it could happen again but we need to just keep putting it up and putting it up," added Harris.
The pastor says he'll use the torn sign in his service this Sunday, allowing people to reflect on the feelings seeing it destroyed gave them.
He does have a message for the person who did this.
"Just because we're saying Black Lives Matter, doesn't mean his life matters less. Our worth as human beings is not pie, it's not finite, so if we say the lives of one group of people matter it doesn't mean that other people matter less," said Harris.
