A New Board and a New Vote in San Francisco

Back in 2019 I wrote a couple of postings about the San Francisco Board of Education’s vote to digitally archive and then destroy the New Deal murals depicting the first President in the city’s George Washington High School.

The ironies of the Life of Washington murals case made it stand out from other disputes about public art featuring historic figures. For one thing, the painter, Victor Arnautoff, was quite critical of Washington’s treatment of enslaved Africans and dispossessed Native Americans. That meant the right-wing arousal media went into its usual frenzy to defend art by a Founder-bashing Communist.

For another, the students at Washington High School seemed largely okay with the murals, to the extent that anyone had asked them.

After a few months the board changed its vote to preserve the murals but conceal them. An alumni group sued to keep the art on view, and in 2021 a judge ruled that the board hadn’t performed an environmental impact review before ordering the change.

That ruling puzzled me for a couple of reasons. First, most of the board’s original financial allocation for removing the mural was in fact for an environmental study. And second, what unusual environmental impact would paint or curtains have on a high school?

A little research tells me that the California Environmental Quality Act actually includes “cultural resources” among the factors that an agency must assess before a project, so the name “environmental impact review” is a little limiting. And the judge’s main point was that the board should have done that review before deciding to cover the mural and not the other way around.

Meanwhile, the San Francisco school board plunged into other controversial initiatives, including renaming schools on occasionally shaky historical grounds and ending test-based admissions at one. There was an election, then a recall election earlier this year, and finally three recalled board members replaced with mayoral appointees. The vote to recall those three board members was overwhelming; on the other hand, the total number of votes was far less than in the last school board election.

Last month the reconstituted board voted 4–3 to reverse its plan to alter the Life of Washington murals. That doesn’t mean the issue is settled forever. After all, people have been criticizing how these paintings depict black and Native figures since the late 1960s. But I suspect the issue won’t come up again for another generation.