Author Alice Walker Decries Efforts to Censor San Francisco’s George Washington Murals as ‘Ignorant and Backwards’

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author and activist Alice Walker has
spoken out in a new interview, conducted August 19 in Oakland,
California, saying that the San Francisco School Board should
rethink its recent much-debated decision to censor murals at George
Washington High School. The 1936 artwork is currently set to be
covered up in response to protests by students and parents over
what they see as racist and degrading imagery.

“Leave the mural and explain the mural to the children,” The
Color Purple author argues in the interview, which was posted
by the Labor Video Project to YouTube. “Why try to hide the
reality of our history—which is a terrible one? If you really want
to educate people, leave the stuff and teach them what it means…
It’s just very ignorant and backward to think that you can erase
history, erase reality, by destroying art.”

In addition to her status as a prominent black feminist
intellectual (Walker is actually credited with coining
the term “womanism,” an alternative to feminism that incorporates
race and class), Walker’s statement has a particular weight when it
comes to the controversy over the murals at George Washington High
School: Her daughter attended the school.

“I think this feeling that everyone is now so tenderhearted that
they can’t bear to know the history is ridiculous,” Walker says. “I
have been able to encounter my own, both the Native American and
the African and the European, and it didn’t kill me.” She argues
forcefully that the murals should be accompanied by a text
explaining its meaning and used as a teaching tool rather than
being removed from view.

Earlier this month, the San Francisco School Board overturned
an earlier decision to destroy the murals
completely by painting them over, voting instead to cover
up the murals with wooden boards as a compromise.

The cycle of murals, titled the Life of George
Washington, was created by Victor Arnautoff in the 1930s as
part of the Works Progress Administration. It is largely a
straight-forward celebration of Washington’s biography, but it
contains panels depicting the first president as a slave owner
and seeming to preside over the murder of a Native American man.
The images have sparked controversy before as being racist.

Debate over the mural has been bitter, with critics arguing that
supporters are defenders of white supremacy. “This country
began by justifying white supremacy through the dehumanizing of
people of color,” San Francisco School Board member Mark Sanchez
argued in a public debate about the mural’s fate last week,
according to the New York
Times. “This is an example of that.”

Supporters argue that Arnautoff put the controversial images
into the mural specifically because he was critical of the effort
to gloss over America’s troubled history. Walker joins
a chorus of prominent community leaders and
activists who have recently spoken out against the board’s
effort to censor or destroy the murals, including the actor Danny
Glover, who attended George Washington High School himself in the
1960s.

The video of Walker ends by cutting to a clip of San Francisco
School Board head Stevon Cook quoting Alice Walker as he opened the
June 25 meeting in which the board originally voted to destroy the
artwork: “The most common way that people give up their power,” he
says, “is by thinking they don’t have any.”

Watch the full interview with Alice Walker below:

The post Author Alice Walker Decries Efforts to Censor San
Francisco’s George Washington Murals as ‘Ignorant and
Backwards’ appeared first on artnet News.