Hodan Hashi was 21 years old when George Floyd was murdered on May 25, 2020.

She was about to become an activist.

“It just felt like we should say something, our voices do matter,” Hashi said on an episode of GBH News Rooted this week. “And that was, I think, the first time where I felt like, we should all be using our individual voices, no matter how young we are, no matter how much experience we have. And so we just did it.”

Looking back now, five years later, the life-long Mission Hill resident doesn’t feel like much has changed.

“I feel like the entirety of my adult life has been waiting for this change that everyone has been talking about to come, waiting for the change that we’ve been fighting for to come,” she said. “And a lot of people older than me will say, ‘this is exhausting, this is tiring.’ I’m 26 years old, and I’m exhausted. And I don’t see change coming. I don’t see anything changing. And it’s hard feeling like, no matter what we do, or how loud we scream, or how we use our voices, everything kind of stays the same.”

It’s a common feeling among many who took to the streets five years ago to express outrage over more than the death of one man at the hands of police in Minnesota. In marches and rallies across the country — including Massachusetts communities both big and small — people gathered to assert that “Black lives matter,” and to demand an end to enduring racism in a system they believed had failed to accept that simple fact. Now, with a retreat from diversity, equity and inclusion happening across all levels of society, many in the movement say 2025 doesn’t seem much better.

“I think when people walk out of their door and their community looks the same, when they’re at the same employment or lack of employment, when they are seeing violence in their community, when they were being interacted with by the police in the same way, it’s hard to make an assessment that things have significantly changed,” Rahsaan Hall, president and CEO of the Urban League of Eastern Massachusetts, said on GBH News Rooted.

Although Hall noted that while the number of police killings peaked nationally in 2024, Massachusetts has seen a 75% decline.

“So, there are some changes, but it’s not the systemic overhaul that people are looking for,” he said.

And while DEI initiatives led to an increase in Black people being hired, Hall said, the recent backlash led by the White House has reversed those gains.

“So, it’s just like the more we see something change, the more things we see stay the same,” Hall said.

A report issued earlier this month by the National Urban League details the ways in which efforts to support diversity programs have been reversed in the last several months.

In a press conference announcing the report, National Urban League President Marc Morial credited President Donald Trump for steps taken in his first administration to reform policing in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

“Five years later, the same Donald Trump now in the Oval Office, that commitment to accountability has dried up,” Morial said. “That commitment to accountability has been reversed with a vengeance … What does this report say? That there was an important series of steps in the right direction when it comes to police reform and public safety ... but that change is incomplete and not permanent as now the forces that seek to turn it back.”

For activists like Daunasia Yancey, the last five years feels like a continuation of a history of struggle.

“We’re still fighting the same fight that the Black Panthers were fighting,” said Yancey, who was part of the Black Lives Matter movement and now serves as Deputy Director for the Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s Office of LGBTQ+ Advancement.

“We’re still worried about fair education for our kids. We’re still worried about housing and affordable housing,” Yancey said. “And I think that people are right that not enough has changed in the past five years, in the past 55 years, perhaps in longer than that.”

George Floyd was remembered at a rally in Milton on Thursday night that was organized in part by Ron Bell, the founder of a nonprofit called Dunk the Vote.

“I think the movement is starting to stir up again, but now you’re starting to see other people other than Black and brown folks. There are other folks that are protesting. It’s like the fire’s being burned,” Bell said at Thursday’s rally.

Bell said the Trump administration’s focus on deporting foreigners is fueling a new burst of social justice activism.

“Because we’re actually seeing it in real time,” he said. “We’re seeing people being stripped out of their homes. We’re seeing it on TV, you know. And for years, Black people have been talking about this happening, right?”

Milton, where Thursday’s rally was held, was one of many communities that saw rallies and marches five years ago. The expressions of support for racial justice weren’t limited to communities of color or to cities. In suburbs and smaller communities around Massachusetts — and around the country — many people gathered to speak out against racism. And in some cases, that experience was a meaningful step towards a commitment to social justice activism.

Milton resident Karen Groce Horan remembers how thousands lined a two mile stretch holding signs expressing outrage and support.

“It was one of the most powerful community moments I’ve ever had in my life,” Groce Horan said. “Police were kneeling with us. It was amazing, and I said, ‘This is different. This is a moment and it’s really lighting the spark on a movement.’”

Groce Horan would go on to co-found an organization in Milton called Courageous Conversations Towards Racial Justice, which partners with community members in neighboring Mattapan to host monthly discussions.

“We take on the topics that are hard to discuss, but we need to discuss and we need to understand in order to bring change and in order to ensure that democracy and justice stand,” Groce Horan said at the Thursday rally.

Groce Horan said it’s been difficult to watch the targeting of DEI efforts in the last several months.

“There has been great progress,” she said. “And I think it’s a natural extension of civil rights and equal justice and progress. But it really puts a strong pause in what we can and what we are doing as communities, so that’s very disheartening.”

Janette Briceno, a volunteer with Courageous Conversations Towards Racial Justice who was also at the rally, said that despite setbacks, George Floyd has not been forgotten.

“Well, while we might not be seeing many of the signs still posted in people’s yards as we did in the past, I think people are very much aware, and they still have it in the back of their minds, because every time we hear of someone being killed because of racism, people call his name” Briceno said.

Newton was among the predominantly white suburbs that saw thousands on the streets in an outpouring of support for racial justice five years ago.

“I think there is something about that moment that really struck a chord in the privileged people who — they’re lucky enough to be able to think about racism and violence against Black people when they want to. And when they don’t want to think about it, they don’t have to,” said Newton resident Kara Peterson.

She went on to co-found an organization supporting DEI initiatives in Newton Public Schools and a company focused on using technology to solve inequities.

Peterson is looking back — and forward — with more optimism than some, referencing the quote made most famous by Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

“It only will bend towards justice if we continue to keep pushing it to bend that way,” she said. “It’s more important now than ever that we don’t say it’s been derailed or that it’s over, because if we say that, then it will be.”

People tend to reflexively turn away from issues like this, Dr. Cecil Webster, a Boston-based board-certified psychiatrist and physician educator at Harvard Medical School and McLean Hospital, said on GBH’s Under the Radar With Callie Crossley.

“We in America often have a lot of comfort around not looking closely at things, not investigating our history, not wrestling with some difficulty in a very basic way of like how our nation came to be and how we interact with one another. So, for many people, this was disruptive.”

Now, Webster believes the backlash against racial justice appears to be a defense against the vulnerability and guilt around a difficult history.

“That erasure that we see these days, and disavowal and defunding of things like DEI initiatives, this looking away from diversity programs, shunning words like ‘diversity’ — all of that feels like very much a defense. And in therapy, we don’t just simply say, ‘stop doing it.’ We invite people to look at, ‘Hey, this might be a reaction to something that’s rather difficult,’ so people can actually engage with something that’s hard but can be enduring.”

And that examination could ultimately prove beneficial, he says.

“We’ve had a long history of unfortunate, difficult, violent moments that we need to contend with,” Webster said. “We can look at it. We don’t have to disavow our responsibility to it. And perhaps we can free ourselves of these patterns that we’ve had for hundreds of years.”