Commentary: The last stand of Tory D. Johnson: What Huntington Beach tells us about the demise of Black Lives Matter

In the summer of 2020, Black Lives Matter felt unstoppable. Protests swept the country, corporations pledged solidarity and police faced calls for reform. But nearly five years later, as the anniversary of George Floyd’s murder approaches, that moment has collapsed — banners gone, donations dried up and racial justice has become taboo. Nowhere is this clearer than in Huntington Beach, where one man, Tory D. Johnson, refuses to let the movement die.

“I came here with a backpack and a dream,” Johnson says. He arrived in 2012, leaving Indiana behind with hopes of music and success. “I wanted to prove my worth — to myself, to the white family that adopted me after 28 foster homes, and to my biological mother, who was 14 when she gave me up.”

He had visited Huntington Beach once before, on tour with a heavy-metal band. The ocean and promise of reinvention stayed with him. “I called it my happy place.” Yet for much of his time here, that place has been living in his car.

After Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020, Johnson’s dream shifted — not to fame, but to changing the story of a city. “I could have been that Black man under Derek Chauvin’s knee.”

When Johnson organized the city’s first major BLM protest, the backlash was immediate. “I posted a flier on Facebook,” he says. “Next thing I know, businesses boarded up and counter-protesters showed up.” Yet anti-vaccine rallies months earlier had drawn no such response. “But me? A Black man calling for justice? That was different.”

Since then, a MAGA-aligned city council has barred nongovernmental flags from city property after a previous council supported the Pride flag, attempted to privatize the library, rejected state housing requirements, imposed voter ID laws, affirmed biological differences between men and women, and dismantled a human relations committee formed in response to white supremacist hate crimes in the 1990s — to name a few of their decisions.

“It’s about control,” Johnson says. “They want to make sure the people who vote look like them.”

Johnson, unaffiliated with national BLM, is caught in the contradictions of a fading movement. “I never got a dime from them,” he says. “But the name still has power.”

By early 2021, white supremacist propaganda surfaced across Orange County. Fliers for a “White Lives Matter” rally at the Huntington Beach Pier appeared on doorsteps. The same city that had responded to Johnson’s protest with fear and plywood now faced an openly racist demonstration.

He arrived in a black suit and tie, channeling Malcolm X. His counterprotest held ground. Then the crowd swelled. Tensions rose. Police declared an unlawful assembly. Ten people were arrested. The rally fizzled, but the message had been sent.

“This city belongs to all of us,” Johnson says.

Johnson represents what remains of BLM in 2025 — not a movement, just individuals still fighting. The world has moved on, yet he remains, a solitary figure tilting at windmills.

At city council meetings, he stands at the podium, one of the few Black voices. “Should I be afraid as a Black man to live in Huntington Beach?” he asks.

Even some supporters ask, “Why do you stay?” They admire his persistence but know the fight has only gotten harder.

His adopted family loves him, but that love isn’t enough to quiet the deeper struggle in his “orphan heart,” as he says, to believe he was never meant to be discarded so easily.

“I’m still here,” he says.

Tory D. Johnson’s fight in Huntington Beach reflects a broader struggle for racial justice — how movements rise, face backlash, and often fade. But the question remains: Will the next generation continue the fight, or will cities like Huntington Beach serve as warnings of how quickly progress can be undone?

Tyler Stallings is a writer, filmmaker, and former museum curator/director based in Southern California. A longtime resident of Huntington Beach, where he has lived for over two decades, he is currently collaborating with Naida Osline on a documentary about Tory D. Johnson, now in the editing stage.