Murals’ racial images confront worldly suburb : Stereotypes featured in school’s WPA artworks disturb some Oak Park parents. Specter of censorship upsets others.

Legend has it that Ernest Hemingway once derided his hometown as a place filled with broad lawns and narrow minds; Frank Lloyd Wright appalled his neighbors here when he ran off with a client’s wife.

More than a half-century later, however, this western suburb of Chicago has become a bastion of progressive liberalism--a sort of Berkeley-on-the-Prairie. And for months now, the talk of the village has been just what to do with four Depression-era murals at an elementary school that provoked cries of racial insensitivity.

Painted in 1936 by Mildred Waltrip, an artist left disabled by polio, the murals were financed by the New Deal’s Works Projects Administration.

They include a map titled “People of the World,” with blacks represented by spear-carrying, loincloth-clad Africans and a shirtless, shoeless American farmer (his white counterpart is fully clothed). Asians in the picture have slit eyes and bowl-cut hair and are identified as “Yellow.” Native Americans are “Red.”

Another map, illustrating U.S. history, shows Native Americans attacking a circled wagon train and a black slave being sold at auction.

The only African Americans on a third map, of U.S. industry, are black women, heads wrapped in bandannas, picking cotton.

A painting that shows various occupations--chemists, steelworkers, a pilot, a farmer--is peopled exclusively by whites.

A small plaque carries a three-word explanation of the pictures’ provenance: “Federal Art Project.”

Last week, the District 97 Elementary School Board decided to remove the pictures, which were painted on canvas and glued to the walls, from their prominent locations in the south hallways of the Hatch School. “They’re not for younger children,” Board President Eric Gershenson said.

But accusations of censorship also made board members determined to display the works somewhere appropriate--and agreeing on a new location is likely to be the most difficult decision of all.

The board would like to exhibit the murals in an Oak Park public school where older children can have access to them--but would not be required to view them--while being taught to place them in context, Gershenson said.

The chairman of the history of art and architecture department at the University of Illinois-Chicago, horrified over the plan to move the murals, is consulting with the American Civil Liberties Union and the federal government.

Others are pleased so far, but still are wary about the murals’ future home.

The uproar began last spring. Darryl Lee, the father of a Hatch kindergartner, wrote to the school district to complain about the images that his son walked past every day on the way to class. “We thought it was offensive racial stereotyping,” said his wife, Patricia, who is president of the school’s Parent Teacher Organization.

In a town that prides itself to the point of obsession on its racial diversity, this was rich fodder for soul-searching. The principal suggested that the Lees contact the district’s Multi-Cultural Advocates Committee.

Then the arguments began in local newspaper columns, on the streets and at special meetings--the most recent of which started with a Native American greeting ritual that took the better part of an hour, followed by small groups discussing their belief systems (“the ultimate Oak Park evening,” wrote Dan Haley, editor of the weekly Wednesday Journal).

The talks revealed much emotional pain. One African American woman in her 40s told her discussion group of getting a new textbook when she was in third grade; the children in her class even got to tear the cellophane off. When she looked through it, the only pictures of people that looked like her showed a male slave strumming a banjo and a girl in corn rows dancing. It still hurt.

A former Hatch student who is now a teacher was quoted in the Chicago Tribune as saying, “Growing up, I thought they were simply ugly, those jet-black pickaninnies with grotesque lips. . . . It sickens me to see these images there for children to see.”

Patricia Lee said: “There were other images of African Americans in reality even back then. This was after the Harlem Renaissance.” She wants to see the murals in an art or racial history museum--there are none in Oak Park--or in a university.

But not everyone agreed that the murals had to go. Benjamin Williams, the principal of Percy Julian Junior High School here, said that as an African American and an educator, “I’m sympathetic to both sides. I’m saying that the mural is offensive, but it can be used to teach children to be prepared to confront those negative stereotypes which you and I know are going to be there as they go down the path of life.”

And David M. Sokol, who heads the UIC art history department, objected strongly. The board’s compromise, he said, is “the first step toward terrible censorship, no matter how good their intentions are.”

The students are angry too. Four Hatch sixth-graders checking out the “People of the World” last week had a wide range of opinions on the issue, but they did agree on one thing: The murals’ fate should have been handled by the people who look at them. “Have the kids and the teachers decide,” said Laura Gilchrist, 11.