Hmong Cultural Center Museum vandalized overnight with white supremacist language
Sep. 8—Days after hosting their first visitors, organizers of the newly opened Hmong Cultural Center Museum on St. Paul's University Avenue arrived Wednesday to discover someone had covered its storefront plywood panels — which still carried messages about Black pride — in coats of white spray paint.
The words "Life, Liberty, Victory" were stenciled on the eastern storefront window, obscuring the poetic verses that once decorated the plywood. The slogan is associated with the white supremacist movement Patriot Front.
"Came in this morning to find our museum storefront 'whitewashed' last night with a possible white supremacist message," Mark Pfeifer, program director with the Hmong Cultural Center, wrote in a message to colleagues.
Pfeifer shared screenshots of surveillance video from a nearby tattoo parlor that shows three people in dark clothing vandalizing the museum around 3:45 a.m. Wednesday. The one vandal wearing shorts appears to have light-colored skin.
"The lock to the museum is welded shut due to all the paint," said Pfeifer, in an interview Wednesday. "We can't even get in there today and probably will not until we can get a locksmith to come over."
Also among the damage, a new $700 sign for the museum was vandalized by the paint.
"We just had our new sign installed this weekend and we were so excited about our formal launch," said Pfeifer, who filed a report with the St. Paul Police Department. "I'm kind of depressed about the whole situation. It shows there's those sentiments out there in the community. We're just going to have to get those boards off of there and possibly get a new sign."
A police spokesperson said officers visited the scene Wednesday morning.
The plywood panels, installed following the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and the ensuing riots, had carried the poetry of Tish Jones, a Black educator and founder of TruArtSpeaks.
Among the lines of poetic verse that were painted over: "Black like aspen roots, the connection runs deeper than the U.S. thought." The lines come from her poem "Because You Keep Asking Me How It Feels To Be Black Here, Now." The poem title had decorated the plywood on the doorway, which also was painted overnight.
The 1,200-square-foot museum, inside a ground-level storefront formerly occupied by Liberty Tax Service, had just begun greeting visitors in the space, which is next to the longstanding cultural center at 375 W. University Ave.
On Aug. 30, 70 first-year students from Macalester College toured its exhibits. On Sept. 7, Pfeifer invited media organizations to visit the museum, which has twice as much exhibit space as the cultural center itself.
"We are very disappointed by this turn of events but we think it shows the strong ongoing need for the work of our center and our museum to promote goodwill and cultural understanding at least to those open to these things," Pfeifer said. "The inside is beautiful. I don't want that to get lost in this whole thing."
