Students walked past the Student Services Addition at the University of Texas at Dallas on July 3 and found a wall missing. The Progress Pride mural that had lived there since 2022 was gone, painted over with no announcement and no explanation posted anywhere on campus. The Retrograde, UTD's independent student newspaper, broke the story on July 3 as the wall came down. The trail backward from that blank wall runs through a single email nobody answered.
One student decided the wall broke the law
David Blackman II studied at UTD as an undergraduate and came back this year for a master's degree. At some point he looked at the Progress Pride mural on the SSA and concluded it violated Texas Senate Bill 17, the 2023 law that bars public universities from funding diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and offices. His case: the university paid for the mural, the UTD logo appears on it, and Student Affairs oversaw the project when it went up in 2022. To Blackman, that combination made it taxpayer-funded DEI messaging on a state campus.
He emailed UTD's Office of Ethics and Compliance in mid-June and laid out the argument. Nobody wrote back.
A design built out of protest
The mural reproduced the Progress Pride flag, the version of the rainbow flag that added a chevron of black, brown, light blue, pink, and white stripes to fold in people of color and the transgender community. It has become the default flag flown at Pride events across the country, and UTD's mural was one campus's version of that same statement, painted on brick instead of nylon.
Silence turned into a viral post
When UTD didn't respond, Blackman sent photos of the mural to Libs of TikTok, the conservative account with a long record of turning local disputes into national ones. The account posted the photo on X and tagged Texas Governor Greg Abbott directly, asking whether the wall complied with his own law. The post pulled more than 273,000 views, and other conservative accounts amplified it. One, Native Texan, called the mural "LGBTQ propaganda."
Within weeks, the mural was gone. Nobody at UTD has publicly detailed who signed off on the removal or on what exact timeline. What's on the record is the sequence: a quiet email in mid-June, a viral post after it went unanswered, a blank wall by July 3.
The law versus the money that actually paid for the wall
SB17 targets taxpayer dollars spent on DEI at Texas public universities: offices, staff positions, training programs, diversity statements in hiring. Whether it reaches a mural painted by Student Affairs three years ago is the real argument here, and UTD's own student government doesn't accept the reading that got the wall erased.
Student Government President David Baker called the removal "a gross overreach of overcompliance with SB17." His argument is about the money's origin. Baker says the mural was funded through student fees, which students direct themselves through Student Government, not through state taxpayer appropriations. SB17 bans taxpayer money for DEI. Student fees, in his framing, are a separate pot entirely. "This wall is not being maintained by taxpayer money," he said.
What's left on the wall
That distinction is the exact gray area SB17 has created across Texas higher ed since it took effect. Facing any ambiguity, universities have mostly chosen to strip things down rather than risk a fight, and a mural is a far easier target than a tenured program or a funded office. No lawsuit. No public hearing. Just paint.
The SSA building now has a blank exterior where a rainbow chevron used to be. There's no word yet on what replaces it, if anything. The mural had stood long enough that most current undergrads never knew a version of campus without it. It took one unread email and one viral post to end that.
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Correction (July 6, 2026): An earlier version of this article misattributed who broke this story. The Retrograde, UTD's independent student newspaper, first reported the mural's removal on July 3, and has since published follow-up coverage of the student protests that followed. We regret the error.
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