Renowned artist’s history of Macon mural hidden

Scenes show the area’s first native people, its early colonizers and some of the city’s most prominent figures.

Other images harken to slavery, lynching and the Confederacy. In the background of one section, a line of Ku Klux Klansmen can been seen marching into the moonlit distance.

Before his death in 1997 at age 78, Beattie saw his work appear in exhibitions at the Smithsonian Institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of Art.

But over the past decade, his Macon creation has become an entombed piece of public art.

The U.S. Postal Service said in an e-mailed statement that because of post-9/11 “security measures,” the walls the mural graces are in an area that is now inside the building’s off-limits “security perimeter.”

The service says the partitions shielding his painting were erected in 2004 to “prevent public access to employee areas which also eliminated access to the murals.”

However, in a phone call, the spokesman cited “insensitivities” in some of the art.

“We’re no longer making (the mural) available to the public — or anyone,” Texas-based spokesman Stephen A. Seewoester said.

A veteran postal worker at the College Street office who asked that his name not be printed said the mural “evidently offended someone.”

Local historian Jim Barfield was given permission to view the obstructed mural this past October.

According to a story he heard secondhand, a visiting regional postal official, a dozen or so years ago, “got incensed” by the mural’s depiction of a slave picking cotton.

George Beattie, an Ohio native, was stationed at Macon’s Camp Wheeler during World War II. While in town, he met his wife-to-be, Virginia Lane, the daughter of a prominent local attorney.

Beattie later taught at the High Museum of Art and at Georgia Tech’s architecture school.

On weekends, he drove down from Atlanta and painted the Macon mural atop Belgian linen on the then-recently opened post office’s plaster walls.

“It’s not like a picture to frame and hang,” Beattie said at the time. “It’s a living part of the architecture of the building.”

After the mural’s debut, in an extensive interview in the Telegraph and News, Beattie, pronounced “bee-tee,” said he spent a year researching local history.

He also discussed the mural scene by scene.

He called the Creek Indians he painted “a phenomenal people.”

His mural also shows explorer Hernando de Soto and offers a glimpse of early Fort Hawkins. In another scene, a slave is picking cotton in front of what appears to be a lynching rope hanging from a tree in the background. One end of the rope, in a noose, dangles loosely around the neck of a female slave who is standing and holding a child.

“I hope the faces and the attitudes of these Negroes,” Beattie said, “will remind (people) of what happened.”

George Beattie III didn’t know his father’s mural here was shrouded by walls until a reporter called him.

“It’s almost a case of political correctness. No, it’s not almost, it is a case of political correctness,” Beattie III said.

Before his father died, Beattie III helped him draft a letter to the post office in support of the mural.

“He was distressed over it,” the younger Beattie said. “He was sad about it.”

One day four or five years ago, Beattie III, who was born in Macon and now lives in Atlanta, went by the post office.

He explained who he was and someone “very cordial” let him into the employee-only area to view his father’s work. The walls that would later hide it hadn’t been built yet.

“My father was doing things in those murals that were very subtle, extremely subtle,” Beattie III said, adding that anyone who concluded his father was somehow endorsing slavery was mistaken.

“His whole idea was to say, ‘Well, I’ve got to show history. How can I show it in such a way that will illuminate the consciousness of what was really going on?’”