Photo courtesy of De’Joneiro Jones
A mural that depicts prominent Black figures on a college campus was defaced this weekend with racist symbols, said Washington University officials. The artists who worked on the mural said this wasn’t the first time their artwork had been vandalized.
According to the school’s newspaper, the painting includes the civil rights leader and former U.S. Rep. John Lewis and the actor Chadwick Boseman, who died last summer and is known for his inspiring superhero role in “Black Panther,” NBC News reported.
“Four top officials at the university in St. Louis, including Chancellor Andrew Martin, sent a letter to students and staff Sunday about the vandalism.”
“This is horrifying and distressing. We’re shocked and saddened by this hateful act on our campus,” the letter said.
While surveillance cameras are located near the mural wall painted on a pedestrian tunnel that connects to several dorms on campus, university officials said Washington University Police Department started investigating the incident. There are no further updates on the investigation. The school is hopeful that investigators will catch the culprits who defaced the campus mural.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported that several of the faces on the mural were painted white and branded with symbols associated with a white supremacist hate group. The group was reportedly involved in the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The institution stated that it did not provide that information to the newspaper and could not confirm it.
The university noted that students swiftly removed the hateful rhetoric.
“As soon as we learned of this incident, we began to mobilize to remove the white supremacist name and symbols from the mural and found that students had already worked quickly to cover them,” the university said.
The painting entitled “The Story That Never Ends” was created by local artists before fall semester classes started in 2020. The artwork highlighted the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, according to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Though the mural came at a time of racial injustice in the United States, it aimed to shed light on Black Americans’ issues in this country, NBC News reported.
One of the artists, De’Joneiro Jones, 47, of St. Louis, said he instantly drove to the mural site once he heard it was vandalized. When he arrived, a Black woman police officer emotionally recalled the racist symbols she saw on the mural, he said.
“She was in tears, telling me the defacement that was there before some of the university students went to their dorms and got fingernail polish remover and removed the actual text that was there,” he said.
The mural has been faced with vandalization in the past, said Jones. Last year, vandals wrote the N-word and “pig” on the sidewalk as the artists took breaks painting the mural.
“It’s crazy,” he said. “We’d have to go get something to eat and come back, and we had to leave the paint out there. So we would come back, and somebody’s done spray painted nasty, nasty, awful things.”
The university condemned the act of hate, noting that it stands in solidarity with students of color.
“Let us say again, so there is absolutely no room for doubt: Washington University stands unequivocally against hate, bigotry, racism, xenophobia, and discrimination in any form,” it said in a statement. “There is no place on our campus for these behaviors, and this type of harmful action will not be tolerated or ignored.”