The elaborate murals on the east end of Allen Hall have been there for more than 60 years without any kind of explanation. The same murals have been a recent cause of controversy.
During the first week of February, Facility Development placed two plaques in the front hall of Allen explaining the history and meaning of these murals and attempting to end the controversy for good.
The colorful murals run along the walls in the front hallway of Allen and on the outside wall between Allen and Middleton Library.
The murals’ depiction of blacks performing manual labor offended several members of the University community. The paintings show blacks picking cotton and cutting sugar cane.
“The whole intent of the work is not to put anybody down, but to glorify the economic diversity of the state as a whole and the contributions that different people made,” said English instructor and Arts and Sciences spokesperson Eleanor Howes.
Several of the murals were covered for many years, and others were in great need of restoration. Facility Development hired LSU graduate and artist Cheryl Elise Grenier to restore and uncover the paintings in the fall of 2000.
After Grenier restored Ann Woolfolk’s painting, which runs along Allen’s front hallway and over the doorway of Room 102, students and staff members began to take interest in them.
Several students approached Reinye Bridges, director of minority affairs for Student Government and ISDS senior, with the issue in 2001.
      Bridges, who then was president of the University NAACP chapter, admitted her initial reaction to the murals was negative, but after researching and discovering the background and meaning, she decided they were important to the University’s history.
Bridges also decided it was important for the murals to be explained so they would not be found offensive to others.
After researching the history of the murals, she helped the effort to get the plaques placed.
The Arts and Sciences, University Center for Advising and Counseling and University Center for Freshman Year college councils sponsored the plaques.
The two identical plaques explain the murals depict the industrial and agricultural development of Louisiana during the time period in which they were painted.
They first appeared during SG-sponsored “Celebrate Louisiana” week because they depict the role of minorities in the development of Louisiana into what it is now, Bridges said.
The murals are actually frescos, art painted into wet plaster similar to Michelangelo’s work in the Sistine Chapel, said Howes. Frescos last longer than average paintings because they are imprinted into the plaster.
Woolfolk, Sue Eleanor Brown and Roy Henderson, art students of professor Conrad Albritzio, painted the murals in the late 1930s and early 1940s.
Howes said the murals were a source of controversy within the University long before their restoration in 2000.
Brown’s painting outside of Allen features a man completely painted in red. Soon after they were painted in the early 1940s, many people thought this was an attempt to glorify communism, and the University eventually covered the painting, said Howes.