Michael Brown Sr. holds up a plaque remembering his son, Michael Brown, who was shot dead by a Ferguson, Mo., police officer. The plaque will replace a makeshift memorial.

FERGUSON, Mo. — The makeshift mid-street memorial that marked where Michael Brown was fatally shot by a police officer last summer was cleared out Wednesday — what would have been his 19th birthday — amid plans to install a permanent plaque in his memory nearby.

Volunteers stuffed animals, candles and other trinkets into trash bags destined for temporary storage, dismantling within minutes the shrine seen by many as a symbol of a new civil rights movement over race and policing.

“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about my son,” Brown’s father, Michael Brown Sr., said earlier Wednesday as he joined Ferguson Mayor James Knowles III in announcing the temporary memorial’s imminent removal.

The makeshift memorial surfaced within hours after Brown, who was black and unarmed, was killed by white Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson on Aug. 9. That event touched off protests and a “Black Lives Matter” movement that only gained momentum with subsequent police killings of unarmed black men in other U.S. cities.

A St. Louis County grand jury and the U.S. Department of Justice declined to prosecute Wilson, who resigned in November. But a separate Justice Department report found racial profiling among Ferguson officers and a municipal court system driven by profit. Release of the report in March led to the resignation of several Ferguson officials.

Before Wednesday, the shrine stretched for several yards on the two-lane road. As its dismantling neared completion, Brown’s father walked up toting the plaque that features an inscription borrowed from a memorial prayer that will immortalize his son.