The giant 1920s-era murals in City Hall are drenched in an ugly racist history, depicting a mythical all-white Appalachia and a glorification of genocide. It’s time for them to go.
Above: ‘The White Man’s Family Council’ (yes, that is actually its name), the Clifford Addams painting that hangs above the Asheville City Council dais, seen here during the 2017 swearing-in of new Council members. This painting and the four others that mark Council’s chambers portray a false and racist history of the region. Photo by Max Cooper.
Tonight Asheville City Council holds its first meeting of the year. Over the past decade, more attention has been brought to the ways in which Asheville remains a segregated city, from the red lines that still mark boundaries of privilege and power to monuments glorifying a violent segregationist regime.
But movements have also rose to counter those old injustices. Black voter turnout has steadily risen and played a role in a still-changing city politics. Local historians have mustered considerable efforts to break the veneer and reveal the stories of black communities in Asheville and Appalachia as a whole. Issues of abuse of power, segregation and gentrification — and the possible ways to fight back against them — are increasingly front and center.
Now, Council has more black and non-white members than ever before, and in December Asheville’s first black city manager, Debra Campbell, took over the bureaucracy’s top job. In recent years the city has formally recognized Indigenous Peoples’ Day instead of Columbus Day. While segregation remains deeply embedded in local government, at least publicly local officials are claiming they seek the change so loudly demanded by many of their constituents.
Even as city government promises to pursue a more equitable course than that of the past, a harsh contradiction sits over their heads. Council casts their votes and holds their debates under a giant painting titled “The White Man’s Family Council,” a mural that’s hung in their chambers since 1928 extolling the pale patriarchal pioneer family. According to the official description, “it represents white man’s civilization” and the supposed “peace, serenity and nobility of a race of people who overcame great obstacles.”
The other paintings aren’t any better. In one, “Indian” warriors with “leering grins” burn a colonizer at the stake. Another glorifies missionaries lecturing indigenous leaders, supposedly bestowing on them a “semi-civilization.” The official descriptions of the paintings reveal how their conception was drenched in a racist view of history and stereotypes of indigenous peoples as “noble savages,” even when it acknowledged the theft of their lands it emphasized their “physical prowess” and portrayed the destruction of their communities as part of making a “center of industrial and agricultural life.” These lies weren’t uncommon in an era so bad it’s often known the nadir of American race relations and a dark time for indigenous communities.
During that time native cultures were brutally suppressed, Jim Crow harshly enforced and a myth of Appalachia as an all-white “Anglo-Celtic” area deliberately spread. It was a lie of course, the history of this city and region were —then and now — shaped by a wide range of indigenous, immigrant and black cultures. The new City Hall where Addams’ paintings were placed literally loomed over close-knit black neighborhoods with an important cultural and economic life, neighborhoods that would see exclusion and demolition in the coming decades.
Symbols and spaces shape power, in their own ways, as surely as politics and policy. It’s not coincidence that a city still marked by racism and a refusal to confront the reality of its own injustices still, 90 years after their inauguration, displays racist propaganda in its halls of government.
The paintings
All five paintings were done by Clifford Addams, a noted engraver and painter. Addams didn’t have any ties to the Asheville area, but he was a friend of City Hall architect Doug Ellington and just famous enough to add some luster to a 1920s city government eager to bolster its profile (and attract outside investment). In a story all too familiar over the ensuing decades, he visited Asheville, then a booming tourist hub, decided he had the story of the people after a conversation with a wealthy historian and painted his works elsewhere before delivering them to City Hall.
The narrative told by the paintings came after a consultation with Foster A. Sondley, a prominent local historian and “defender of the Confederacy.” It’s not surprising that the stories they tell fits firmly in with that official narrative, both in what it leaves out and the myths it props up.
So what follows are the full official descriptions of each painting, starting with the one hanging over Council’s dais.
The White Man’s Family Council — This mural depicts the family council of the white man. It clearly shows the peace, serenity and nobility of a race of people who overcame great obstacles during a fiery pioneer career, to build a civilization in the mountains of Western North Carolina. It represents white man’s civilization peaceful and happy in the life they have wrested out of the ruggedness of the hills.
Council of War — Resistance to the white man’s invasion is pictured here showing the Indians at their council of war while they burn a white pioneer man to death at the stake. The Indians, revealed in their war paints, with leering grins on their faces, are burning a man at the stake, symbolizing the resistance of the aborigines to the influx of the European races, and their harshness in fighting the battles with which they attempted to stave off the steady encroachment of the white man’s thieveries, and the white men’s conquests in battle. It tells a story of a grim, but desperate race, proud in their own strength, beautiful in their physical prowess, indomitable in their protection of their own interests, and unified within their own tribal organizations in resistance to the attack, and appropriation of their homes, and their hunting grounds.
Religious Council — The first evangelistic religious council in this mural shows the missionary girl earnestly reaching the assembled Indian chieftains. This indicates instruction of the Indians by the whites as a semi-civilization began to develop. The missionary girl, in a deep emerald gown, is making her appeal to the assembled Indian chieftains garbed, not only in the variety of their own garments but in the vestments of the white man, and his scarlet uniforms, which they have won by bargain and conquest.
Council of the Invaders — The coming of the first white man to Western North Carolina is pictured in this mural. The white man’s coming is told — DeSoto in conference with his armored men as they pass through western North Carolina in 1540, gay with the garb of the Europe they represented; but nebulous as are the tale of these uncertain gentlemen, while history is written in legend, and fairy tale, and full of a color largely the figment, perhaps, of man’s imaginings, and historians inventions.
Council of Indian Warrior and his Family — This mural tells the story of the Davidson massacre. It depicts the council of a bold and daring Native Indian warrior with his family in the natural setting in the mountain region. The mural reveals the physical prowess of the people who lived among these hills before the White Man came to take them away and make the center of industrial and agricultural life as they are now.
Ninety years too long
Whatever Addams’ influence as a painter, the murals are as terrible as their content is vile. They embodied a false, racist narrative and established a trend of artists from elsewhere parachuting into Asheville to churn out works more propaganda than genuine public art.
But they’ve largely escaped the criticism they’re due. As recently as 2017, the Asheville Citizen-Times ran a column praising them as a significant part of world art history while pointedly quoting very little of their official description or noting the context of racism and anti-indigenous hate that shaped them. Those descriptions aren’t exactly ancient history either. When I first started covering Council in the mid-2000s, they were on an information sheet at each meeting, alongside the official printed agendas.
They shape the space, and not in a good way. The first word I often hear from locals unfamiliar with Council’s chambers is “intimidating,” a place they feel hesitant to go or speak. The paintings are far from the only part of that, but they are certainly a part.
It’s time for them to come down. The contradiction between the lies they glamorize and the path our city supposedly wants to pursue is too glaring to do otherwise. Bluntly, Asheville City Council making decisions, in 2019, beneath a mural titled “The White Man’s Family Council” is a disgrace.
There is also an opportunity here, to replace them with works that depict the history of Asheville not as terrible old white men of yesterday (or the tourism brochures of today) envision it, but with public art done by locals who instead show the life, vibrancy and resilience that have marked the people of this city’s long efforts to survive, resist and build in the face of many oppressions. There are far more interesting and important stories, perspective and artistic talent right here than Addams could ever muster. Our City Hall needs to reflect that and while one doesn’t expect miracles in the halls of government, they can damn sure offer a better picture than this.
—
The Asheville Blade is entirely funded by our readers. If you like what we do, donate directly to us on Patreon or make a one-time gift to support our work. Questions? Comments? Email us.