Objection to how a mural shows Black people led to this plan to educate, interpret

A mural on the facade of the Will Rogers Memorial Center that drew concern about its portrayal of African Americans has fostered a community effort to design interpretive plaques to promote cultural and historical understanding.

The plaques would be installed to provide context to several murals on the Will Rogers Memorial Center auditorium and coliseum to describe the murals, which were designed in 1936. Concerns were raised in 2019 about how one of the murals portrays African Americans picking cotton.

Estrus Tucker is chairman of the Fort Worth Art Commission, which was tasked with addressing the situation. He said he approached the matter with his team at the commission with a goal of allowing people to evoke their understanding of the piece instead of the the commission imposing its view of what it means.

“We wanted to be real, and there’s some downsides and some upsides to what was happening in Texas in the agricultural industry, and we didn’t want to give out anything that was not factual,” Tucker said. “It’s like an appetizer. It needs to be accurate but you can’t tell the whole story, but tell them enough that they want to go and follow up and have a conversation.”

In September 2019, the Mayor’s Office asked the Fort Worth Art Commission to gather community input and make a recommendation in response to concerns raised about the mural depicting Black field workers picking cotton alongside other agricultural workers.

There are 12 murals in all depicting a variety of cultures and historical moments, such as Native Americans trading with white colonists and hunting buffalo. Murals show Mexicans in traditional clothing rejecting a Spanish conquistador, Texans with the Confederacy preparing a cannon to fire, and men digging for oil in the early 20th century.

On Nov. 21, 2019, the Will Rogers Memorial Center Interpretation Advisory Panel, which was appointed by the Art Commission, met with community members at the Hazel Harvey Peace Center for Neighborhoods, where people spoke in favor of leaving the murals in place and presenting historical context for the murals at the site.

The Advisory Panel spent the next few years doing research, which included focus group meetings with community members representing the diverse cultures depicted in the murals and consultation with experts on local culture and Texas history.

The City Council approved the allocation of American Rescue Plan Act funds in the amount of $300,000, the reallocation of $100,000 in Public Events Capital Funds and $35,000 in Public Art Funds on Oct. 19, 2021, to pay for the project.

A public hearing took place on June 12 at the Hazel Harvey Peace Center for Neighborhoods, and the Art Commission’s draft text for the plaques was made available on the Fort Worth Public Art website.

Tucker says people gave positive feedback to the solution and said they did not want the murals to be taken down. They wanted the plaques to be an educational tool describing what the murals meant at the time they were created.

The staff used the input received from the public hearing and published the final plaque design and text on the program’s website, and the Art Commission approved the plan on July 17. A brief review of the project was on the City Council’s work session agenda Tuesday.

There will be two introductory plaques and 12 plaques specific to individual murals, for a total of 14 plaques.

The text on the plaque with the Black field workers will read:

“Use of the land and its value was changing dramatically. For the first two decades of 20th century, agriculture led the state’s economic growth. Texas produced almost one third of America’s cotton. This scene depicts tenant farming and sharecropping, systems in which freedmen, poor white, and Mexican workers farmed rented land for a share of the harvested crops. Sharecropping rarely resulted in farm ownership. After World War I (1914-1918), many laborers moved to cities for work, forcing landowners to modernize with machinery to harvest millions of acres of cotton, wheat, and other crops.”

The time frame for construction and installation is estimated at eight to 10 months with construction starting between February 2024 to late summer.