Selah OKs final plan for mural promoting racial equality in lawsuit settlement

By Donald W. Meyers Yakima Herald-Republic

Plans for a mural promoting racial and ethnic equality in Selah are moving ahead.

Volunteers, with city permission, have cleaned and primed the North First Street retaining wall where the mural will be painted, and the City Council gave near-unanimous approval for the design.

The mural is part of settlement between the city and the Selah Alliance for Equality, which sued the city in 2020 over the city’s removal of SAFE’s signs promoting racial equality and calling for the removal of then-City Administrator Don Wayman.

Mindy Clark, the local artist who created the mural’s design, said the 300-foot artwork is going to be one of the longest murals in the state. Clark and Courtney Hernandez, one of SAFE’s leaders put up an 80-foot-long quarter-size rendering of the mural, running along the wall from behind the council dais and well into the public gallery.

The mural will feature a group of diverse people, based on photographs of Selah residents, standing before a scene with fish bearing the word “friends” in more than 30 languages, as well as round symbols taken from a variety of cultures, including Africa, Asia and Latin America.

“I’m a process artist. I like layers of things. I like people to come personally to see my work and get closer and discover things,” Clark said.

The mural is so big, there’s not a place where a person can see everything at once. That will encourage people to come closer and appreciate the detail and meaning that it contains, she said.

Hernandez, who posed for one of the figures, said the group represents the community’s diversity, both in ethnicity and other details, including one person sitting in a wheelchair.

The only dissenting votes were cast by Council Members Kevin Wickenhagen and David Monaghan.

When he was running for mayor last year, Monaghan objected to paying $25,000 for Clark to do the mural and said it would be better to pay school students to paint pictures on the wall.

SAFE and seven of its members sued the city in U.S. District Court in December 2020 over the removal of SAFE’s signs promoting racial equality and protesting city policies.

The suit accused the city and then-Mayor Sherry Raymond and Wayman of censoring the group’s messages in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s First and 14th Amendments.

SAFE members alleged Wayman and other city employees removed signs with messages such as “Hate Has No Place in Selah” and “Fire Donald Wayman,” erased pro-Black Lives Matter chalk art, threatened chalk artists with arrest and refused to read SAFE members’ comments at council meetings on grounds that they violated “decorum rules.”

Wayman remained a defendant even after his firing in May 2021. In a deposition taken as part of Wayman’s wrongful termination claim against the city, Raymond said Wayman was fired because of the near-constant controversy he spawned during his tenure, including his disparaging the Black Lives Matter movement and its local supporters.

Under the settlement, the city paid SAFE $300,000, committed to pay $25,000 toward the mural’s creation as well as add a name to Selah’s Volunteer Park. The settlement originally called for Upper Yakama leader Owhi’s name to be appended to the park, but it was changed to United Farmworkers co-founder Dolores Huerta after concerns were raised about getting proper permission to use Owhi’s name.