Town Destroyer

Town Destroyer explores the ways we look at art and history at a time of racial reckoning. The story focuses on a dispute over historic murals on display at San Francisco’s George Washington High School; the murals depict the life of George Washington: slave owner, general, land speculator, president, and a man Seneca leaders called “Town Destroyer” after he ordered the destruction of their villages during the Revolutionary War. Heated debates spill into the community and make national headlines. The fight—taking place in the wake of battles over Confederate monuments across the United States—becomes a catalyst for a national discussion about censorship, reparations, generational trauma, the ways in which America’s history of genocide and slavery is taught and memorialized, and the differences between monuments built to further white supremacy and art that critiques racism.

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