“YOU KEEP THOSE SLAVES ON THAT WALL!! That’s how you sound trying to push this falsehood about how this mural is the truth about ‘our’ history,” Cook insisted, grossly distorting everything that those who wanted the murals preserved had said. “They somehow believe that this one mural, in this one high school hallway is the only, or premier, opportunity to teach about the complexities of American history.”
The campaign to destroy the murals attracted newspaper and TV reporters from around the world. Editorials in papers from the Guardian to the Wall Street Journal denounced the idea, and a poll of San Francisco voters showed that 76 percent opposed destroying the murals, while only 12 percent favored doing so.
While most state and local politicians ran for the hills on this issue, a tsunami of opposition to destroying the murals poured forth from the George Washington High School Alumni Association as well as from local community, arts, civil liberties, and preservation organizations.
Most of the leaders of these groups were as liberal as those advocates for the murals who had been so scorned by the school board in the first place. Even worse, many of them were not white. They included Washington High alumnus Danny Glover, who asked, “Why board it up? Why can’t we tell the truth?” and called the proposed boarding up or destruction of the murals “absurd” and a “tragedy.”
“I’m the father of a Washington High graduate. My daughter was never traumatized by Arnautoff’s painting—as a matter of fact, it generated conversations at home that otherwise would not have occurred,” concurred former San Francisco mayor, speaker of the California State Assembly, and local political legend Willie Brown in the San Francisco Chronicle. “It was a learning experience for her, and for me.”
“Am I offended by these murals? My answer is NO,” insisted Robert Tamaka Bailey, a Choctaw language instructor, in a statement from the alumni association, “but I would be offended if you took them down, because then I would see you as those who say, ‘It didn’t happen and there are no Indians left to offend.’”
Bailey had taken part in the Native American occupation of Alcatraz, half a century before, in 1969. Another veteran of those years spoke up as well: Dewey Crumpler, still making art and teaching it now too, at the San Francisco Art Institute.
“People are not taught how to read art and artistic imagery. So they don’t understand how it operates, they are trying to look at images literally, not euphemistically, not symbolically,” Crumpler explained in an interview with artnet.com. “Your confrontation with difficulty is the very thing you need as a child, particularly in an educational environment, so you can learn how to deal with those difficulties that you are going to run into throughout your life.”
Crumpler was adamant that “if you run away from history, you’ll never change history. You have to confront history. . . . My mural is part of the Arnautoff mural, part of its meaning, and its meaning is part of mine. If you destroy his work of art, you are destroying mine as well.” Which it seems to me is the heart of the matter, in history as in art.
The activists and the censors of the San Francisco school board want to tell a story of struggle and empowerment—as well they should. But without depicting oppression, how to portray struggle? Without the whole truth, how does this story shine? What was it that all those remarkable people of color on Dewey Crumpler’s walls had to fight against? What was it that they overcame?