Meghan Porter taught her chemistry class Friday in a room with a 12-foot-tall painting that showed hooded Ku Klux Klan members in front of a burning cross. It was the last hard science class that will be taught in Woodburn Hall 100 at Indiana University. The decision to limit which classes are scheduled in that room was made to appease both those who think the mural should be taken down and those who think it should stay.
The painting is decidedly anti-Klan. It’s one of 22 panels that formed a mural depicting Indiana’s social history, painted by artist Thomas Hart Benton for the state’s pavilion at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair. The panels were stored in Indianapolis after the fair until then-IU President Herman B Wells arranged for them to be donated to the university in 1938.
Panels from the mural are displayed in three locations on campus: the IU Auditorium, the IU Cinema and Woodburn Hall 100, the largest lecture hall on campus. One of the two panels in Woodburn Hall is titled “Parks, the Circus, the Klan, the Press.” The Klan members and burning cross are in the middle of the panel, but they are much smaller than a man shown at a typewriter in the foreground. Benton’s intent was to show the role journalists played in exposing the Klan, which had infiltrated all levels of Indiana government in the 1920s.
Including the Klan was controversial from the beginning, but Benton successfully fought against that opposition because he believed the mural needed to show all aspects of the state’s history. Since the panel was installed in Woodburn, there have been multiple attempts to have it removed. For years, administrators refused. Adam Herbert, the university’s first and only black president, argued in 2005 that it was an important reminder of the pain, suffering and fear that African-Americans had to live through.
Things changed after the so-called “Ignite The Right” rally drew hundreds of demonstrators and counterprotesters to the University of Virginia campus earlier this year. The rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, was organized in opposition to a plan by local officials to remove a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. When it was over, three people were dead and more than 30 were injured.
The incident sparked a national conversation about the removal of Confederate monuments and served as the motivation behind an online petition calling for the panel to be taken down. The petition on change.org titled “Remove KKK Mural in Woodburn Hall at Indiana University” had more than 1,700 electronic signatures Friday. Jacqueline Barrie of Louisville is listed as the creator. Attempts to speak with her for this story were unsuccessful.