“My fellow citizens,” Abraham Lincoln said, “We cannot escape history.”
Escaping history — painting it out, removing inconvenient reminders of the past, and revising unpleasant details — is exactly what is going on these days. And Northern California is leading the way.
One of the latest examples is the San Francisco school board’s decision to paint over a mural at George Washington High School in the Richmond District because the piece shows African American slaves working on Washington’s Mount Vernon estate and white settlers stepping over the body of a dead American Indian.
The argument was that the murals showed images from the country’s racist past. They are offensive.
“It’s always an issue when anyone wants to remove or cover or displace art,” said Mark Sanchez, vice president of the school board. “But there are many countervailing issues we had to look to as well. We believe students shouldn’t be exposed to violent imagery — that is degrading.”
The mural — which covers over 1,600 feet on the walls of Washington High — was painted 81 years ago when the school was new. The mural is called “Life of Washington,” and the artist was Victor Arnautoff, one of the noted muralists of his day. This was not the first time Arnautoff’s work had caused problems.
One of his murals — this one called “City Life” — is on the ground floor of Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill. It shows life in San Francisco during the Great Depression, complete with economic troubles, even an armed robbery. Arnautoff painted himself in the mural, standing next to a newsstand. Instead of respectable papers, like The Chronicle, the stand displays leftist publications such as Masses and the Daily Worker, the Communist paper. In another panel, Arnautoff shows a patron in a public library reaching for a book — by Karl Marx.
Arnautoff was born in Russia and was a card-carrying Communist. Conservative San Franciscans were outraged. They wanted Arnautoff’s murals destroyed or covered up. Arnautoff’s work was offensive to the right. Now his work is offensive to the left.
Once again, this part of the world is on the cutting edge of a movement — removing the past.
In the same week San Francisco voted to paint out the George Washington mural, UC Santa Cruz decided to remove a mission bell from its campus because it represented the Roman Catholic missions that imposed Western culture on California’s native people.
“It is shameful that these places where our ancestors were enslaved, whipped, raped, tortured and exposed to fatal diseases have been whitewashed and turned into tourist attractions,” said Valentine Lopez, chairman of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band.
The university removed the bell “in support of efforts to be more inclusive,” according to university Vice Chancellor Susan Latham.
Earlier this year, San Francisco took down a sculpture offensive to American Indians from the “Early Days” monument in Civic Center.
And this winter the Humboldt County college town of Arcata removed a statue of President William McKinley from the town square on grounds that McKinley was racist. His administration favored Western expansion, annexed Hawaii and colonized the Philippines.
If we follow these policies to their logical conclusion, UC Santa Cruz should change its name. Santa Cruz, which means “Holy Cross” in Spanish, was once a mission.
So was San Francisco. We should look into Mission Dolores. If a bell is offensive, what about Mission Street and the Mission District?
Don’t forget McKinley. San Francisco not only has a McKinley statue in Golden Gate Park, but McKinley Square on Potrero Hill and McKinley Elementary School in the Mission.
As you can see, there is plenty of work to be done. There are other murals to be examined — like the work by Anton Refregier in the Rincon Center. One of them shows Chinese Americans being beaten up by white thugs. Another shows a man being hanged by vigilantes.
And what about Balboa High School? Wasn’t he a conquistador?
We should appoint a commission — call it the Correctness Commission — to examine the backgrounds of the people who have streets named for them. Columbus Avenue is out, of course, and so are Washington and Jackson streets and Junipero Serra Boulevard.
But what about all those other streets with Spanish or Mexican names? Juan Bautista de Anza was an Indian fighter, so Anza Street will have to go. And who were Arguello, Ortega, Moraga, Rivera and Santiago? Who’s behind Noe Valley and Bernal Heights?
You can see where this line of reasoning can take us. Lope Yap Jr., who is the vice president of the George Washington High School alumni association and opposes painting out the school murals, put it best.
“Are you going to change the name of Washington state?” he said. “Are they giving out explosives to blow up Mount Rushmore?”
Editor’s note: This story has been revised since it originally appeared to correct the reference to the school board’s decision on the mural.