Black Panther Mural Backers Reject Funding : Politics: Arts group accuses the city of trying to undermine the project, which is to include a depiction of Huey Newton holding a gun. Councilman Holden has been an outspoken critic.

Saying a battle with city officials was threatening to cripple their organization, members of a nonprofit public arts group Wednesday turned down city funding for a controversial mural of the Black Panthers.

“With great pain, I say, ‘We give up,’ ” said Judy Baca, founder of the Social and Public Arts Resource Center, which annually produces a slate of city-sponsored public art projects.

Baca said city officials had threatened to pull the plug on SPARC’s $250,000 contract for the current budget year unless SPARC dropped the mural from its list of city-funded projects. An official at the city’s Cultural Affairs Commission, which approved the mural earlier this month, said the contract has been held up by paperwork. The mayor’s office, which must sign the contract, did not respond to a request for comment.

Baca said the mural probably will still be painted, without public funding, on the wall of a barbershop at 11th Avenue and Jefferson Boulevard near the Crenshaw district.

Artist Noni Olabisi’s tribute to the Black Panthers attracted considerable opposition and won approval from the city Cultural Affairs Commission only after nearly a year of debate. It was criticized for its title (“To Protect and Serve”) and the fact that it featured Panthers co-founder Huey Newton with a rifle.

Baca criticized Councilman Nate Holden, in whose district the barbershop is located, for trying to stall the project even after it gained Cultural Affairs Commission approval.

Holden said he wants the City Council to formally ask that the mural site be changed.

He likened placing the mural in a drug- and gang-infested area to “shouting fire in a crowded theater,” and asked rhetorically why the only murals of blacks “that show hanging, lynching and pain are the ones in South-Central?”

Holden denied trying to hold up SPARC’s funding, but said he would have done so if the group had not backed down. “Then I would question their motives, their . . . concern for my constituency.”

The 40-foot-long mural, which would be accompanied by text explaining the Black Panthers’ history, has Newton as its centerpiece, but also includes scenes of the Panthers’ breakfast program and a Panther rescue of a black man from a Ku Klux Klan noose.

Baca is one of Los Angeles’ most renowned visual artists, being the principal leader on such works as the half-mile-long “Great Wall of L.A.” along the Tujunga Wash. SPARC has done 73 murals in its Neighborhood Pride program since 1988.

Holden said the Panthers mural was planned for a location he called a “crime scene,” referring to an Oct. 13 police raid on the barber shop, Hair Expressions. The raid resulted in two arrests and the confiscation of several bags of marijuana on customers and two handguns, one in a store cabinet.

Baca charged that police staged the raid in response to the Cultural Affairs Commission’s approval of the mural a week earlier, and accused police of a smear campaign.

Detective Trinka Porrata denied the accusation, saying residents had complained about the shop for months, but that the LAPD South Bureau narcotics squad was too strapped for personnel to go to the shop before Oct. 13. The barbershop’s owner, meanwhile, said police had only come by before for haircuts.

Baca defended the mural, saying that although it has been pulled from her group’s Neighborhood Pride program, she would be happy to help work on it. She called the mural “a way to dispel violence. The role models the kids have right now are gangsters. There have never been perfect leaders--look at Nate Holden.”

She said the fact that Newton holds a gun across his chest in the mural does not make it threatening, noting that Army recruiting posters show figures holding guns. “It’s all a question of who’s holding them,” she said.

Both Baca and Holden claim that community opinion is on their side. Baca’s group says it held more than a dozen meetings to get community input. Holden insists that residents have been clamoring against the mural, and that several church officials have also opposed it.

“I’m not right-wing and I’m not coming after her (artist Olabisi), and the church members are not right-wing,” Holden said. But “when we’re in a war we have to use whatever weapons we can,” he told the City Council on Wednesday, saying that banned assault weapons should not be favorably displayed on murals.