What happened to a pair of historic murals at Texas Southern University? Earlier this month, workers covered them with white paint — and apparently not by accident.

Those murals were eyesores, TSU president John Rudley told Chronicle reporter Sarah Raslan: "When I bring dignitaries to campus, I can't have them seeing that kind of thing. All art isn't good art."

But as TSU museum director Alvia Wardlaw argued, those two murals, by TSU professor emeritus Harvey Johnson, were good art - not just an important link between the university's past and its present, but still powerful in their own right.

It helps to know some history. When TSU was founded in the late '40s, it was the "Texas State University for Negroes." Painter John Biggers, one of the art department's founders, instilled in his students what can be thought of as the Biggers Doctrine: the powerful combination of technical mastery and respect for their African and American heritages.

Biggers urged students to think big and to paint big - and before they graduated, he required each of them to paint a mural somewhere on campus. Many of those student murals were painted over after a few months. But the best were allowed to remain permanently, and over the years, TSU's murals came to be one of the best things about the campus.

Harvey Johnson was one of Biggers' star pupils, and in 1971, he painted two murals on the walls of Hannah Hall, TSU's administration building. Like Biggers, he combined African themes with a muscular, American style.

But unlike Biggers, whose titles were in standard English, Johnson came of age in the era of Black Pride, and his titles intentionally carried eccentric punctuation, as well as echoes of church spirituals and the everyday talk he heard around him: Mothers of "the Fathers and the Son" and Dere's a "Han Writin on de Wall." At a time when segregation was officially over but stubbornly refusing to die, claiming a place for everyday black talk in art was a radical, urgent matter.

Of course the world has changed enormously since 1971. A black family now occupies the White House, and when Beyoncé cavorts with Lady Gaga, racial integration is the least shocking thing about their video. But African-American identity is a more complicated matter than ever, and Johnson's murals had lost none of their unsettling power - as President Rudley's discomfort with them showed.

Late yesterday TSU announced that the president's office will spend $50,000 to restore and preserve the university's remaining murals. That's a good move. Unfortunately, it won't bring back the Harvey Johnson murals.

Like other historically black universities around the country, TSU is struggling with the question of its mission. How much should it try to attract students of different races? How much should it deepen students' understanding of African-American culture? And how hard should it try to propel black students into a wider world?

We think it's a university's job to prepare students to interact with other cultures, and obviously, an accounting major would be ill-advised to use "de" or "dere" - the kind of language Johnson celebrated - during an interview with a Fortune 500 company. And likewise, that accounting-firm interviewer will care more about the student's skills than her pride in her African heritage.

But preparing for the wider world shouldn't require erasing one's African-American identity. And African-American art and history have something to say to all Americans, not just black ones. Of all places, it seems to us, a historically black university ought to celebrate the complexities of that culture.

By erasing Johnson's mural, TSU erased an important part of its own heritage - and its students' heritage, and its city's. Maybe the paintings made the president and the dignitaries who visited him uncomfortable. But art, like education, isn't about making people comfortable. Sometimes we all need to read the handwriting on the wall.