Following an outpouring of criticism from across the United States, an Arizona elementary school principal has announced that he was reversing his decision to lighten the skin of black and Hispanic students depicted in a new school mural, according to the Examiner. The controversy in Prescott has become the latest flash point for debate over the state's anti-immigration posture, which some have decried as racist.

During a radio interview last month, Prescott city councilman Steve Blair set the issue in motion when he criticized the Miller Valley Elementary School mural, an artwork promoting environmentally responsible public transportation that features depictions of real children of various races who currently attend the school. The central figure in the mural is a black child, and a Hispanic child is included on the right. “To depict the biggest picture on the building as a black person,” Blair said, “I would have to ask the question: ‘Why?’” Motorists objecting to the mural, meanwhile, began hurling racial slurs at the artists working on the mural.

Blair asked Miller Valley Elementary principal Jeff Lane to lighten the skin tone of the students depicted, and Lane at first agreed — but denied that the decision had anything to do with race. “We asked them to fix the shading on the children's faces,” he said last week, according to USA Today. “We were looking at it from an artistic view.” R. E. Wall, one of the artists working on the project, spoke to press about the decision and disputed that claim.

On Saturday, Lane apologized for his decision, saying the mural would remain as it was. The school's artwork is hardly the first mural to foment political controversy. In 2008 a debate erupted over the preservation of a mural at an Idaho courthouse that depicted a white man preparing to lynch two Native Americans. Most famously, anti-Communist protesters successfully brought about the destruction of Diego Riveras Man at the Crossroads mural at Rockefeller Center in 1934 because it depicted Vladimir Lenin — a erasure carried out despite protest from the Museum of Modern Art.