"Negro eating watermelon": murals, chronicles and polemics in New York. 1933-1936

Abstract

The essay analyzed the presence of the portrait of an Afro-American smiling and eating watermelon – one of Three hundred figures from Law through the Ages mural painted by Antonio Pusterla for the dome of the County Court House rotunda in New York between 1934 and 1936 – that caused the protest by local black community (politics, lawyers, artists, businessmen, and church-goers): they requested to Samuel Levy, Manhattan District borough president, and to Ernest Peixotto, painter and member of New York Municipal Art Commission to remove the portrait: "a Negro eating watermelon wasn't sufficiently dignified for courthouse murals and it was burlesque of the race".