In 2021, a mural on the South 40 underpass was vandalized with white spray paint and white supremacist symbols. Mitchell Wagner received two years of unsupervised probation on Tuesday for his role in the crime. (Curran Neenan | Student Life)

One of the vandals who defaced a Black history mural on the South 40 underpass with white supremacist messaging in December of 2021 was sentenced to two years of unsupervised probation Tuesday morning. 

Mitchell Wagner — a 24-year-old white man from Florissant, Mo. — was arrested in January 2022 and subsequently charged with felony first-degree property damage after surveillance footage showed him and three others vandalizing the mural. Wagner was the only individual who was identified and charged.  

The mural was covered with white spray paint and symbols associated with the Patriot Front, a white supremacist group that, according to the Anti-Defamation League, was involved in a spike of racist propaganda distributed throughout the country in 2020. Shortly after it was defaced, students quickly removed many of the hateful symbols, leaving just the white paint over the original portraits. 

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Wagner pled guilty to second-degree misdemeanor property damage and paid $8,000 in restitution in addition to his probation.

The mural — titled “The Never Ending Story” — included portraits of prominent Black public figures like George Poage, the first Black American to win an Olympic medal in the 1904 St. Louis Olympics, and Robert L. Williams, a WashU professor who coined the term “ebonics.” 

De’Joneiro Jones, the St. Louis-based artist commissioned to lead the group of artists that painted the mural, believes that Wagner’s sentencing should have happened much earlier. 

“People have forgotten about what happened,” Jones said. “Now we gotta revisit and relive something that was going on during COVID.”

Brock Seals, another artist on the project, similarly described the sentencing as frustrating. 

“It’s just another instance where the justice system has failed us,” Seals said. “Someone goes on the campus and defaces private property and expresses outright hate, and you get a slap on the wrist for that.” 

Jones described the project’s goal as education and empowerment — ideals that were quickly overwhelmed by repeated defacement. Jones recalled a separate incident where racist and homophobic slurs were spray-painted onto the underpass in 2020 when it was first being painted, a year before the vandalism in which Wagner was involved. 

“We were faced with hateful opposition the minute we got on campus,” Jones said. “I didn’t want that to overshadow us being there, so I didn’t talk about it.” 

In the aftermath of the vandalism, Jones, Seals, and other artists involved in the mural put together a photo book to commemorate the process of painting the mural. 

“We never had a ceremony to talk about the mural…[and there was] no closure,” Jones said. “It was painted a couple of weeks before everybody went on break, and then, when it was time for people to see it, the vandalism happened.” 

When the vandalism initially took place, WashU administrators responded with condemnation, calling it “horrifying and distressing.” Students began to remove the Patriot Front symbols from the mural on the same night that the vandalism occurred. 

Jones said that he wishes the University had made greater efforts to preserve the mission of the mural after the incident. 

“This is the pinnacle of a lot of our art careers. To have it erased and then ultimately painted over is reducing it to a blur,” he said. “It’s unfortunate that the University doesn’t want to be on the good side of history in terms of sending a message that this is not accepted here.” 

Julie Flory, Vice Chancellor for Marketing and Communications, declined to comment on Wagner’s sentencing on behalf of the University.