Reference file in public folder from CSS in create-react-app

I am using creat-react-app (CRA) and simply want to include a png file placed in the public folder via CSS (I keep all image files there). Now I am trying to reference this image via CSS (I only added the background-image line to a freshly generated CRA app):

.App-header {
  background-color: #222;
  height: 150px;
  padding: 20px;
  color: white;
  background-image: url("../public/example.png");
}

You attempted to import example.png which falls outside of the project src/ directory

How do I reference the image file from within the CSS-file without copying somewhere inside /src? I also don't want to eject the application and get rid of the error message.

Edit: This question is different from The create-react-app imports restriction outside of src directory because it does not show how to solve this problem at a CSS level. The proposed solution is to add the style inside the JavaScript file which I don't want to do.

Just use a / before the name, this will make it relative to the output root, which includes anything in the public folder (provided the finished hosted application is served at the root of a domain).

so for the question asked above:

.App-header {
  background-color: #222;
  height: 150px;
  padding: 20px;
  color: white;
  background-image: url("/example.png");
}

the critical part being

/example.png 

refers to a file, example.png, that is in the public folder (served at the root level)

Could also be relative:

one could also use

./example.png

provided that the css file was also imported from the public/build directory, this would be relative to the css file and not depend on being served at the domain root, but typically in CRA webpack will bundle the CSS and it may or may not be loaded from this location. (you could import it in the html file directly using rel tag with the %PUBLIC_URL%/Styles.css macro)