Despite board decision, debate over school mural goes on.
The debate over a controversial mural had reached a fever pitch.
Those who wanted to destroy the racially charged fresco at Washington High School argued that preservationists were asserting white privilege to save an offensive painting.
Those who wanted to save it held that erasing the mural is no better than bookburning censorship.
San Francisco was split in two, with opposing sides facing off over which progressive value mattered more: free speech or racial justice.
The city’s school board chose the latter, voting unanimously last week to paint over the mural, which features slavery and white settlers stepping over a dead American Indian, calling it a form of reparation for historic racial injustices against African Americans and Native Americans.
But the debate is far from over. Mural supporters have threatened to sue. The school board’s vote left open the option of covering the art with panels rather than painting over it if jumping over the legal hurdles to destroy it takes too long.
Still, the decision reverberated across the city and around the country, stirring intense emotion and debate at a time of national reflection over race and reparations for historic atrocities as well as what to do with public displays that reflect that ugly past.
“I understand the position where people believe you should leave the murals and the monuments up so we don’t forget,” said James Taylor, University of San Francisco politics professor. “The problem is on a daily basis, unless that’s contextualized, it causes injury to young people and to their families and to the
“We don’t burn great art. It is unconscionable.” Richard Walker, director of the Living New Deal Project
staff.”
Does intent matter?
As the school board mulled the fate of the mural, Gov. Newsom this month apologized for the “systemic slaughter” of Native Americans in the past and signed an executive order issuing an apology.
And in September, San Francisco officials removed from Civic Center Plaza the 2,000pound, bronze “Early Days” statue of a Native American at the feet of a Catholic missionary.
The question of what to do with the Depressionera mural has been arguably more complicated, with the fresco’s origins and the artist’s intent far removed from the glorification of the Confederate South or Manifest Destiny.
The 1936 fresco, painted on wet plaster, is the work of Russian artist Victor Arnautoff, and part of the Works Progress Administration public art program under President Roosevelt’s New Deal employment projects. The 1,600squarefoot “Life of Washington” mural features multiple panels with scenes from the life of the first president.
Arnautoff was a known Communist and mentored by Mexican artist Diego Rivera. At the time, his school mural was considered something of a subversive work, illustrating Washington’s connections to slavery and slaughter.
“This mural was meant to correct the whitewashed — in both senses of the word — textbooks of the time that remained whitewashed until recent times,” said Leslie Correll, a 1961 Washington High graduate who knew Arnautoff through her artist father.
That said, the students need to be heard, Correll said.
“My first thought is the tragedy that the students’ feelings were not addressed long ago,” she said, adding that should be a priority regardless of the mural’s fate. “This is my big issue because the people who want to save the mural and the people who are offended by the mural should be on the same side.”
Yet compromise suggestions — like covering the mural with curtain or panels — were discarded as unacceptable by those on both sides prior to the vote.
Censorship charges leveled
Much of the debate centered on whether covering or destroying the mural amounts to censorship — a hotbutton word that harks back to Harry Potter or Huckleberry Finn book bans, as well as Nazis burning Picasso paintings or Taliban soldiers blowing up sixthcentury Buddhas.
In the U.S., censorship is often associated with the conservative right raising concerns over sexual content, offensive language or perceived attacks on social norms. But as the mural debate illustrates, censorship isn’t tied to a particular ideology, said Nora Pelizzari, of the National Coalition Against Censorship.
“Especially right now, censorship is an equal opportunity idea,” she said, adding destroying the mural is unequivocally censorship.
Local mural preservationists agreed.
“We don’t burn great art. It is unconscionable,” said Richard Walker, director of the Living New Deal Project, which is documenting WPA art. “It’s something reactionaries do, fascists, it’s something the Nazis did, something we learned from history is not acceptable.”
Protecting students
Critics countered that the art is offensive and harmful to students, inappropriate for a school. It’s about putting children before a painting on a wall, they said.
“Think of all the families, the children who have walked through there,” said Joely Proudfit, professor of American Indian Studies at California State University, San Marcos. “What images do they see? Dead Indians to the left and African Americans to the right in bondage.”
Instead of censorship, Proudfit sees the opportunity to fill the paintedover space with new art featuring Native Americans by Native American artists.
“Let’s make new frescoes,” she said. “To me the reparation there would be allowing for the First Nation and first people be heard for once.”
The district faced similar concerns about the mural in the 1960s, when a group of black students called for the destruction of the mural. In response, officials hired artist Dewey Crumpler, who is black, to paint “compromise murals” depicting Latinos, Native Americans, Asian Americans and African Americans overcoming oppression.
More than four decades later, Crumpler weighed in on the current debate.
“I understand the students anguish over difficult and traumatic imagery, but whitewashing and removal are not the solution,” he told The Chronicle in an email. “I think we are moving closer to the slippery slope of only permitting art that satisfies our temporary need for comfort.”
Dug in, the preservationists argued the original mural should not be replaced, but rather used as a teaching tool, a visual guide to Arnautoff ’s intent as well as how history lessons have often left out a comprehensive picture of people of color.
Remember history so as not to forget, they said.
“I would use subjects like the mural to teach the students about slavery and the abuse of Native Americans and the white supremacist actions of Washington and other founding fathers,” said Mary Frances Berry, professor of American social thought and history at the University of Pennsylvania.
Yet current and former Washington High students have said that kind of instruction hasn’t happened. There is no explanation, no conversation about the mural at the school — just a largerthanlife dead Native American.
The students of color who walk by the mural every day don’t need to be reminded of slavery and the massacre of Native Americans — they are still living the ongoing legacy, said Amy Anderson, an indigenous parent of a Washington High student. The artist’s intent matters little to students who are offended or humiliated by the images they see on their way to class every day, she said.
“A majority of our teachers in this school district aren’t people of color,” said Anderson. “They are majority white and dominant white culture infiltrates every corner, every desk, every classroom, every hallway.”
It will cost at least $600,000 to paint over the mural, which includes a required environmental impact report, district officials said. If preservationists file a lawsuit, the district’s costs could increase significantly.
The unanimous board said it’s a price they are willing to pay, equating the cost with a form of reparations, a tangible acknowledgment of the historic atrocities associated with slavery and the slaughter of Native Americans.
“I think it’s symbolic and real at the same time,” said board Vice President Mark Sanchez. “I think it’s something that can be healing.”
Academic experts, however, bristled at the notion that destroying a mural is an acceptable form of reparations, or monetary compensation for descendants of slaves. It’s an issue that Congress has been debating in recent weeks.
“Painting over an image of George Washington, or taking down a statue of a former Confederate general, or putting up a statue commemorating enslaved folk hardly amounts to ‘reparations,’ ” said William Darity Jr., Duke University professor of public policy, African and African American history and economics. “Certainly, these may be desirable things to do, but these piecemeal, noncompensatory acts are not reparations.”
William Sturkey, assistant professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, also criticized the comparison, but argued the destruction was the bare minimum owed to people of color.
“We owe far more to the future than we do the past,” he said.
Board sees urgency
Estimates vary, but it could take several years to get through the legal and bureaucratic logistics required to paint over the mural. While white paint is preferable to panels, board members said, the mural needs to be removed from public view sooner rather than later, and that could mean covering it with panels instead.
In the meantime, both sides have vowed to keep fighting.
How far do you go with this? Are you going to blow up Mount Rushmore?” said Lope Yap Jr., vice president of the Washington High alumni association. “We’re going to strategize and figure out our numerous options, and I feel in the end we will succeed.”
Following the vote, some mural supporters acknowledged that covering it with panels has become an acceptable choice given the nonreversible alternative. Critics remained steadfastly committed to erasing the images from existence.
“After 500 years of feeling the negative impacts of colonization as an indigenous person, their vote meant to me there’s a public recognition of the suffering we have been made to endure because of colonization,” Anderson said. “We’re not resting, we’re not stopping, not until there’s white paint over those murals.”