|
The masking of the murals comes as the university based in
the Idaho city of Moscow prepares to mark the formal opening of
a satellite campus for its law school at the former Ada County
Courthouse in September.
By covering the images, including one in which a bound Native
American man kneels beneath a tree whose branch bears a noose,
the university acknowledges they will be offensive to some and
that they are not representative of a known historical event, a
school official said on Thursday.
“Displaying these lynching murals is not consistent with our
educational mission,” said Lee Dillion, an associate dean of the
university’s College of Law.
The paintings were controversial from the time they were created
by a team of artists led by a southern California painter and
installed in the courthouse not long after the Art Deco
structure was built in the late 1930s, Dillion said.
A state judge ordered them covered in the 1970s, and for decades
U.S. and Idaho state flags shielded the murals from view.
A debate over the artworks reignited several years ago when the
building was temporarily used by the Idaho legislature during
renovations of the nearby statehouse, Dillion said.
Representatives of Native American tribes in Idaho and national
and regional organizations did not immediately respond to
requests for comment.
David Leroy, a former Idaho attorney general and former chairman
of the Foundation for Idaho History, said the paintings could
still be worth studying.
“The paintings support the case for how unfairly and grossly the
original peoples were treated by the white settlers who invaded
their aboriginal territories,” he said.
There were no known lynchings in Idaho involving Native
Americans or African-Americans, said Dillion, but a national
database suggests more than a dozen whites were lynched in the
state for crimes such as cattle theft.
(Reporting by Laura Zuckerman in Salmon, Idaho; Editing by
Cynthia Johnston)
[© 2015 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2015 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
|
