Black
students in
1968 didn’t
complain
about trau-
matizing im-
ages. If any-
thing, they
wanted more
violence:
armed rebel-
lion, slave
revolts.shot to death while surrendering to police with his hands
in the air. When four white students complained that the
poster was offensive, the administration promptly had it
removed. The decision provoked outrage from black stu-
dents who argued that the killing of Hutton represented
their history, “as did the murals at Washington portraying
black slavery.” They called out the administration for
employing a racist double standard.
The black students, however, did not complain of
psychological harm or traumatizing violent images. If
anything, they preferred more violence in the mural—
the violence of armed rebellion, slave revolts, and
anti-colonial resistance. They objected to portraying
the enslaved and colonized as victims, working faith-
fully, lying prostrate, dead. So they sought out a black
artist of their generation, someone familiar with the
politics of black power, brown power, yellow power,
and red power. They chose Dewey Crumpler, an activist
and a graduate of San Francisco’s Balboa High School
studying at the San Francisco Art Institute. When the
commission was finally approved in 1970, Crumpler
was just 22, though he had an impressive résumé.
Upon receiving the commission he went to Mexico to
study with muralists—including Pablo O’Higgins and
David Alfaro Siquieros, whom he met through Eliza-
beth Catlett, a brilliant African American artist living
in exile in Cuernavaca. A veteran of the left, she too was
influenced by Rivera.
Crumpler took time to study Arnautoff’s murals
and came to appreciate their value as art and as a social
statement. He informed the students that he was inter-
ested not in replacing Life of Washington but in creating a
work in dialogue with Arnautoff’s work—and with them.
Completed in 1974, Crumpler’s dynamic Multi-Ethnic
Heritage celebrated the cultural, political, and intellectual
histories of African American, Latinx, Asian American,
and indigenous peoples. Incorporating portraits of Mal-
colm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Simón Bolívar, Cesar
Chavez, and Dolores Huerta (among others), the mural’s
three panels are linked by a motif of chains breaking. The
central figure in the panel dedicated to African Amer-
ican heritage is a black woman, issuing from a broken
chain like a phoenix rising above a flame. For the Native
American panel, Crumpler explained, he painted an In-
dian “holding up Turtle Island, which was Alcatraz. That
Native American would be an archetype, with his body
stretched out into the sky, not dead but fully alive. And
articulated as the blood of the earth, with the red soil, the
energy of the earth.”T
oday crumpler is among the most outspoken
and authoritative defenders of Life of Washington.
He has said on countless occasions, “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.” He devoted
years to creating the work in conversation with a gener-
ation of Washington High students whose struggles for
dignity, knowledge, and power convinced them of the
value of art—even art we don’t immediately understand
or that challenges our common sense.
I find it ironic that Mark Sanchez, the vice president of
the school board, used the word “reparations” to describe
the $600,000 cost of the Arnautoff murals’ erasure. In do-
ing so, he not only perverts the concept of reparations but
also fails to see that precious funds that could have been
invested in arts education or an anti-racist curriculum will
be used to cover up a work that actually makes a powerful
case for reparations by revealing how white liberty and
the wealth of the new nation were built on slavery, colo-
nialism, dispossession, and genocide. Certainly, students
can learn this in their classrooms, and they can see it in the
streets of San Francisco as rising rents and corporate land
grabs continue to displace poor black and brown people
in the city. I hope that future generations will possess
the courage and the curiosity to rediscover Arnautoff’s
murals and the world in which they were created. For by
revisiting the era of labor insurgency, anti-fascism, and
anti-eviction campaigns, students might learn the most
valuable lessons of all. QCall and response:
Dewey Crumpler’s
three-panel mural,
commissioned in
response to student
demands, celebrated
the diversity of the
school’s community.