Mayor Femke Halsema did not disperse the protest. She would later defend that choice in front of an angry city council, but the people in the square that afternoon could not have known the political consequences yet. They knew only that they were standing shoulder to shoulder in the middle of an outbreak, holding signs in Dutch and English, hearing speakers describe being followed by Dutch police, being denied internships, being asked one more time where they were really from. Surinamese Dutch families stood near Moluccan Dutch families stood near Indo Dutch families — communities whose presence in the Netherlands traces directly to centuries of Dutch colonial rule in the Caribbean, Indonesia, and the wider East Indies. For many of them, the American footage had unstoppered something old.

Over the next six weeks, the protests spread to nearly every corner of the country. Groningen and The Hague on 2 June. Arnhem on the 4th. Enschede, then Nijmegen, then Eindhoven and Tilburg. Maastricht protested twice. Zwolle, Middelburg, Lelystad, Den Bosch, Leeuwarden — 2,000 to 2,500 there alone. On 10 June a second Amsterdam gathering at Nelson Mandelapark drew 11,500 people. On 14 June, between 2,600 and 3,000 marched in Almere. On 17 June Haarlem filled the Haarlemmerhout with 2,000. On 19 June a smaller crowd in Hoorn gathered in front of the statue of Jan Pieterszoon Coen — the Dutch East India Company governor whose seventeenth-century massacre on the Banda Islands had been taught for generations as a footnote — and the protest tipped into a confrontation in which five people were arrested. The map of June 2020 reads like a Dutch atlas. Almost no town stayed silent.

On 4 June, during a press conference originally scheduled to address foreign holiday travel, Prime Minister Mark Rutte called George Floyd's death unacceptable. Then he said something he had spent years carefully not saying: that racism in the Netherlands was a systemic problem, and that he had changed his mind about Zwarte Piet, the blackface companion of Sinterklaas whose presence in Dutch holiday tradition had been fought over for a decade. The country's first reaction was disbelief that Rutte had used the word systemic. On 25 June he invited protesters to the Catshuis — but the organizers of Black Lives Matter NL and Kick Out Zwarte Piet were left off the list, and the meeting was rightly criticised for talking around the people who had built the movement. The leaders were finally invited on 2 September. Rutte promised practical steps toward zero racism in healthcare, housing, education, and employment. There would be no third meeting.

What deserves remembering is not only the crowds at the Dam. It is also Dronten, where over a hundred people gathered at the Meerpaalplein. It is Diemen, where primary school pupils with a few adults held what the newspapers called a small protest. It is the relay demonstration that ran from 12 June onward — every weekday from 9 am to 5 pm a single person stood on the Dam, replaced each hour by another, under the hashtag zolanghetnodigis, which means as long as it takes. It is Ede with a hundred people on 11 July, weeks after the news cycle had moved on. The story of Dutch June 2020 is not only the size of the largest crowds. It is the breadth — small towns and large, school children and pensioners, organisers who knew exactly what they wanted and bystanders who had simply decided they could no longer stay home.

A Hart van Nederland survey in early June found 49 percent of Dutch respondents supporting Black Lives Matter, with 46 percent opposed. A LINDA survey skewed female found 75.8 percent supportive. The country was not united, but it had been pushed into a conversation it had been avoiding for years. The Zwarte Piet debate accelerated. Statues of Coen and other VOC figures became flashpoints. Surinamese, Antillean, Moluccan, and Indo Dutch voices that had been describing the same experiences for decades were finally, briefly, listened to. Some of the change has held — many cities phased Zwarte Piet out of municipal celebrations, schools updated curricula on the slave trade and the East Indies. Some has slipped back. But the summer of 2020 left a mark on the Netherlands that no Catshuis meeting alone could have made, because it was made in town squares from Leeuwarden to Maastricht by people who had decided they would no longer wait for permission to grieve.