Monday, March 5, 2018

Shayne Grant: Tennessee School Removes Mural Depicting Hanging

     In a small Tennessee elementary school, a mural that depicted a lynching by a man holding a Confederate flag was finally taken town. While it is unclear how long the painting has been in the school, it first received complaints in December of 2017. The school claims that the mural was supposed to be innocent and simply showed a school district rivalry. Parents are outraged at the image calling it not apart of Southern heritage but completely racist. However, many in the school are receiving backlash for taking the mural down with many advocating for its presence as a show of patriotism and heritage.

       It is appalling that this mural ever was a thing and that it took so long for it to be take down. Not only is the Confederate flag controversial, the practice of lynching should not be taught as a positive thing to kids at the elementary school age. I'm glad that school has finally taken action to take it down however it should not have been an issue in the first place. Hopefully many will understand the underlying messages of racism and violence depicted in our culture that is passes our "moral tests" in the defense of "heritage."

https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/05/us/hanging-confederate-mural/index.html

2 comments:

  1. I wrote about this as well, and it is very surprising that this mural wasn’t even considered being taken tldown until a janitor from another school noticed it. I don’t understand why the principle thought this was okay to have in an elementary school

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  2. This just goes to show that there is a huge difference between remembering our history and honoring it; for example, we'll soon talk about McCarthyism and although there are numerous texts and museum exhibits about the era, we aren't exactly erecting countless statues of the man, just as the Spanish don't memorialize the perpetrators of the Spanish inquisition and the Cambodians don't venerate Pol Pot even if they were all citizens of their respective countries.

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