Donna Williams Lewis, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, April 28, 2009
Walk into the state Department of Agriculture building on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and descend a few steps into a small lobby.
A guard beckons from a stand to the right, where visitors are asked to sign their names. Those who look up from the book take in a scene that has left some speechless, confused or some, even angry.
On the wall just behind the guard is a 4-by-7-foot mural depicting slaves picking and ginning cotton as an overseer weighs their bags.
{snip}
Turns out the slavery mural is one of eight original paintings on two floors that were commissioned to create a visual timeline of agriculture in Georgia.
{snip}
Ronda Racha Penrice, a Grant Park history buff who recently saw the murals and picked up one of the handouts, said that even after looking over the printed information, she found the murals “disturbing.”
The display should be updated, Penrice said, because it makes contributions of black people to the development of agriculture appear to be limited to what they did as slaves.
“I think we have to understand that in the time when they were created, there would absolutely be no problem with them. But I don’t know that they’re appropriate for 2009,” Penrice said.
The “problem” is not a new problem. Historic murals depicting stereotypical scenes of slavery or savage Indians have been debated elsewhere for years. The Department of Agriculture murals have escaped such public scrutiny, maybe because few people see them. Just about 200 people work in the Agriculture building, which averages about 12 to 15 visitors a day, according to officials.
There are four murals in the lobby, including the one at the reception desk. Two represent Native American and Colonial times; two depict slavery.
{snip}
The murals were commissioned for the building that was completed in 1956, the year Georgia’s state flag was changed to incorporate the controversial Confederate flag. They were painted by the late George Beattie, a noted local artist who was executive director of the Georgia Council for the Arts from 1967 to 1975.
The new handout describing them includes a quote from Beattie, who acknowledged in a 1995 article that his slavery murals were troubling to some.
{snip}
Bruce Wade, an associate professor of sociology at Spelman College, showed his class a photo of one of the slavery murals. He said they felt it simply reinforces an image of blacks’ subservience to white people.
{snip}
But Brenda James Griffin, who retired in 2005 as the Agriculture Department’s assistant commissioner of public affairs, said she finds the paintings inspiring. She said she looks at them and sees people who did what they had to do to survive and thinks about how far their descendants have come.
“We have had some people who have found them to be offensive,” said Griffin, who worked in Agriculture for 30 years. “I say I as a black woman see it as a part of history. . . . We can’t just roll out history when it’s convenient.”
Shocking mural depicts black slaves as subservient to whites.
Original article
(Posted on April 29, 2009)
Comments
“He said they felt it simply reinforces an image of blacks’ subservience to white people.”
“The display should be updated, Penrice said.”
Strange, if they took the mural down blacks would complain that they’re trying to white wash the history of slavery. And just what are all those contributions to agriculture blacks have made since slavery ended? Did they invent the combine? Hybrid corn? Cotton picking machinery? Aside from the peanut butter guy, what have they done?
Interesting that there’s never any talk of the free blacks in the ante-bellum South who owned black slaves. I guess that’s not a subject that’s allowed to be spoken of.
From what I’ve heard and read of slavery, you couldn’t pay me to own one. Too much time and effort was devoted to making sure they did what was asked of them. I think the saying, “if you want something done right, do it yourself” must have come from a slave owner.
Tom Iron…
‘mural depicts black slaves as subserviant to whites’
Thank goodness the mural was in the Department of Agriculture building.It might be disturbing if it was in most any other department.
I guess they wouldn’t be interested in the water-stained photo from my grandmother’s attic of my great-grandfather standing in the field amongst a bale of cotton surrounded by a black female and a black male sharecropper. (That’s history! Looks like it came straight out of a history book. Don’t have that photo re-touched!)
How about some poor Whites dying of malnutrition because the rich White elites used slave labor AND used the profits from the slave labor to buy up all the fertile land thus sending the poor Whites to the infertile mountains and sandy shores of the Gulf where it is impossible to grow crops?
“”The display should be updated, Penrice said, because it makes contributions of black people to the development of agriculture appear to be limited to what they did as slaves.”“
- And I suppose, in her incompetent hands, she would have credited blacks with inventing every machine and method of agriculture ? The sickening fact is that large left wing media companies are buying up the rights to do just that - rewrite and republish old history books - published prior to 1960, and making blacks sound as wonderful as they currently imagine that they are.
Liberals seem to want to keep blacks in bondage through the slave identity .
There were many whites who were slaves.
Creating more black rage contributes to black on white crime and violence.
Blacks were slaves?
The odd thing is, this mural could also be interpreted as black labor being exploited by plantation owners.
Aside from the peanut butter guy, what have they done?
Hate to break it to you, WR, but G.W. Carver wasn’t the inventor of peanut butter. You’ve got a white guy to thank for that, too!
Leaves them speechless, eh? Seems we need more murals.
“Aside from the peanut butter guy, what have they done?”
Please go to:
http://www33.brinkster.com/iiiii/inventions/#peanutbutter
>>>I think the saying, “if you want something done right, do it yourself” must have come from a slave owner.
Slavery as an institution was already DYING OUT in 1864 — it would have ended BEFORE 1900 even without the Civil War. Slavery was NOT cost effective; slaves had to be constantly watched; everyone had to be vigilant and ready to take arms in case of an slave uprising. It simply was NOT worth the cost!
I agree those murals were inaccurate. We should have had murals of slave-raiding African coastal tribes selling their captives into slavery. Pictures of Black slave-owners mistreating their own kind.
As a White American, I am tired of the ludicrous Hollywood portrayal of slavery. No slave-owner with brains would deliberately beat and torture his chattel to the point of inflicting permanent physical damage. Trained slaves had monetary value, like prize cattle, fine horses. How many farmers would deliberately cripple valuable cattle or horses?
Most slaves received decent treatment as long as they did their work and had a good attitude. Rewards for outstanding performance were more common than brutality. Good slaves received gifts of better clothing, better food and even money from time to time from owners. But Hollywood, and the low mentality people the Propaganda Factory caters to… prefer to distort truth and historic fact. Blood and gore sells better than reality. A lesson Hollywood learned decades ago.
The urge to deny history is intellectual and moral cowardice. It can never promote improvement, and only enforces ignorance - and that’s undoubtedly why the Left pursues it.
And blacks who were slave-owners.
It certainly would make an interesting story. But Hollywood would never show that. Never! It doesn’t fit in with the anti-white agenda.
The most interesting thing about ‘slavery’ is that the ‘5 civilized indian tribes’ in America kept black slaves. That is, if you believe there was ‘slavery’. Don’t expect to hear about this black history month when slavery comes up. Quite the opposite.
‘“I think we have to understand that in the time when they were created, there would absolutely be no problem with them. But I don’t know that they’re appropriate for 2009,” Penrice said.’
Thank you for basically admitting what many of us have known for a long time: history is being rewritten.
“History is a pack of lies about events that never happened, told by people who weren’t there!” - George Santayana
When you come to Manhattan, NY you will see buildings such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of American Financial History, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, et al. These are edifices dedicated to the creative genius of Whites. What museum will you find dedicated to the “accomplishments” of blacks? The African Burial Ground, a “potters field” for free and enslaved blacks. Enough said.
http://www.africanburialground.gov/ABG_Main.htm
Is there something inaccurate about showing Blacks as slaves in the American South of the 19th century?
The contributions of Blacks to agriculture? Even today, in Africa, they can barely feed themselves.
As a child I often heard of slavery; however, when I had become a man I was told to put away such childish notions.
Now, I learn during black history month, that blacks invented: mailboxes, electricity, street lights, telephones, television, ice cream, peanut butter, blood banks, horses, automobiles, airplanes, rockets, dogs, computers, cows, atomic energy, the Internet, hydrino power, cats, and cold fusion! Of course this list is not exhaustive!
It is amazing to me that a race that has done so much, for so many, for so long, requires but a mere month to tell its story.
What this mural actually depicts is not that the Black man is actually picking the cotton you understand, but that it is the Black man who actually INVENTED the cotton to be picked!
How the cotton got picked, of course, if it did, is irrelevant!
MoMo
Thank goodness the mural was in the Department of Agriculture building.It might be disturbing if it was in most any other department.
Literally all government buildings and departments are run and staffed by blacks, did none of them ever complain?? or is it that so few of them come to work, they just don’t notice the mural? Has everyone here been in a federal government building in the last few years??
“On the wall just behind the guard is a 4-by-7-foot mural depicting slaves picking and ginning cotton as an overseer weighs their bags.”
Typical journalistic ignorance displayed by the story’s author, Donna Williams Lewis. Do the two white men in frock coats in that painting look like “overseers”? More like plantation owners or cotton merchants.
She knows American history only as a cartoon.
It leaves some people “speechless, confused, angry”?
Come now! It is really a very innocent, peaceful scene, a picture simply of people working, not despicting cruelty or abuse of any kind.
What would our delicate reporter think if she saw, just for instance, photos of the recent Knoxville murder victims? And of so many other black-on-white crime victims like them. How about pictures of the many white crime victims in South Africa?
If she is left “speechless” by a picture of people peacefully ginning cotton, then she has led a very sheltered life. The poor dear!
Those blacks had to work —- how awful! Of course, whites don’t know anything about work, so naturally we wouldn’t understand.
“Of course, whites don’t know anything about work, so naturally we wouldn’t understand.”
I once saw Maya Angelou (the much revered black guru) state on television that white children couldn’t understand what black children go through because life on Park Avenue is completely different from growing up in the ghetto.
Well I wouldn’t know about life on Park Avenue either. Talk about stereopying! And this is supposedly the voice of black wisdom.
Oh yes, we were all born with silver spoons in our mouths. And we have a money tree in the backyard.
“He said they felt it simply reinforces an image of blacks’ subservience to white people.”
Posted by voter at 6:31 PM on April 29
No, but they left out the image of Whites being suberviant to other Whites. Also, the Whites in North Africa being sold and held in Slavery. This is just a dumb stuff.
Blacks invented murals and cotton and the department of agriculture and all of the plants and animals on earth ,
Shocking mural depicts black slaves as subservient to whites.