And the Mural Came Down: Race, Removal, and Reckoning in the Sunshine City

Abstract

In 1966 Joseph Waller and other members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee removed George Snow Hill’s Picnicking at Pass-a-Grille (1945) from St. Petersburg, Florida’s, City Hall. For more than two decades, the mural had hung alongside its pendant, Hill’s Fishing on the Pier (1945). Together, the paintings offered a vision of civic progress that denied Black audiences full participation in public life. Yet even in its absence, Picnicking at Pass-a-Grille troubles the present. The Sunshine City’s deferred reckoning with its public artworks and urban projects of racial oppression is a local history with national resonances.