The First of Many

A NEW LSU MURAL HONORS THE UNIVERSITY'S FIRST BLACK PROFESSOR

By Christina Leo

For many, the year 1971 doesn’t seem too long ago, but for the history of Louisiana State University, it marked a pivotal moment that changed the makeup of the school forever. It marked the year it hired its first Black professor, the Alexandriaborn and Urbana-Champlain-educated architect Julian T. White. This summer, the College of Art & Design teamed up with the Baton Rouge-based Walls Project and the LSU Foundation to commission a mural in White’s honor, a three-panel goliath celebrating his thirty-three years in education and acknowledging the mark he's made since his passing in 2011.

Painted by Lafayette muralist Robert Dafford, whose near-five-hundred works can be found across the United States, Canada, France, Belgium, and England, the Julian T. White mural hangs sixty feet above the college’s atrium and depicts White leading a procession of students from the university’s iconic bell tower through the varied architecture and live oaks of LSU’s campus (also among them are Boyd Professor and Philip W. West Professor of Analytical & Environmental Chemistry, Isiah Warner). In the tradition of Benozzo Gozzoli’s paneled mural the “Procession of the Magi” in Florence’s Palazzo Medici-Riccardi, which inspired Dafford, the artist’s medium works to exalt White’s legacy in a larger-than-life approach appropriate for someone who opened so many doors for students and professors of the future.

One such student was Ken Tipton, Jr., the leader of Baton Rouge’s Tipton Associates architecture firm, who was also once an adjunct professor working under White.

“Julian White was a talented architect and an exceptionally gifted teacher,” he said. “He met prejudice and hardship and with grace and passion. He was a mentor to many and modeled what it meant to be a professional for generations of students. For many of us, Julian White was the definitive face of Architecture at LSU. He changed the world one student at a time—architects and architecture in this State are indebted to his influence. I, for one, am forever grateful.”