SAN FRANCISCO — In June, Laura Voisin George, a graduate student, was writing a scholarly article about a series of W.P.A. frescoes at the University of California, San Francisco. Ms. Voisin George, recognized a central figure in one of the vivid social realist tableaus: Biddy Mason, a Black nurse, is depicted alongside a white doctor, as they treat a malaria patient. Mason, an enslaved woman born in 1818, went on to become a midwife, a nurse, a philanthropist and a founder of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles. Ms. Voisin George, who studies history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, learned that the frescoes were about to be destroyed while she was researching.

Source: New York Times August 11, 2020 21:06 UTC