September 7,2011
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Page 9
The Problem We All (Still) Live With
Anti-black
bigotry in the
political arena
by L ee A.
D aniels
When is a
painting not
just a painting
-b u t a mirror?
T hat’s the
q u e s tio n
w hich leaps
out of the cur
rent controversy over a painting
that President Obama secured to
hang in a well-trafficked corridor
outside the Oval Office that first
appeared 47 years ago in one of the
most widely-read magazines in
America and has been exhibited
numerous times throughout the
country ever since.
The answer - of course - is when
the subject of that painting - Norman
Rockwell’s famous “The Problem
We All Live With’’ - is America’s
ongoing racial crisis.
In November 1960 four six-year-
old African-American girls enrolled
in the first grade of two New Orleans
public schools which until then had
enrolled only white students. That
“desegregation” precipitated the
New Orleans schools crisis. Howl
ing mobs of white men, women, teen
agers and children, protesting that
violation of the bedrock principle of
Jim Crow, gathered daily to curse
and threaten the girls, who were
escorted into and out of the schools
by a brace of federal marshals.
Four years later, Norman Rockwell
stunned American society with
what quickly became the most iconic
painterly depiction of the Civil
Rights Movement. “The Problem
We All Live With,” focusing on
Ruby Bridges, the lone black stu
dent at the William Frantz Elemen
tary School, appeared in Look Maga
zine, another widely-read publica
tion, on Jan. 14,1964. It showed an
immaculately dressed black girl,
carrying her school textbook and
ruler, walking between four U.S.
marshals. On the wall of the school
behind them were some of the tradi
tional markers of white racism - the
word “nigger” and the acronym
“KKK” stand out, and the wall is
stained from the remnants of a re
cently-thrown tomato.
The painting, now in the perma
nent collection of the Norman
Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge,
Mass., was the more stunning be
cause it came from Rockwell, whose
considerable public esteem rested
on the more than 300 paintings of
sometimes humorous and some
President Barack Obama joins Ruby Bridges to view Norman Rockwell’s "The Problem IVe All Live With," hanging in a West Wing
hallway near the Oval Office. Bridges inspired Rockwell's 1964 illustration.
times poignant scenes embodying
homespun American values he had
been painting for the covers of the
conservative-oriented Saturday
Evening Post magazine for more than
40 years.
But Rockwell was a more complex
figure than his paintings for the
Saturday Evening Post indicated.
Further, in 1963, having ended his
long relationship with the Post and
signed on with the more cosmopoli
tan Look Magazine, his publicly-
exhibited work began to reflect his
broader interests in poverty, space
exploration - and civil rights.
In that regard, for an artist whose
sympathies lay with the civil rights
struggle, 1963 was a year of pro
found provocation: It included,
among other events, the Birming
ham demonstrations of May 1963;
the assassination of Medgar Evers
in June 1963; the March on Wash
ington in August 1963; the murder
ous bombing of the Sixteenth Street
Baptist Church three weeks later;
and the assassination of President
Kennedy that November.
One result was “The Problem We
All Live With.”
Two years later Rockwell pro
duced another, even more haunting
painting— “Murder in Mississippi,”
depicting the infamous 1964 murder
of the three civil rights workers.
Long before he took office, it was
apparent that the political successes
of Barack Obama and other African-
American politicians in securing
enough votes from whites to break
new ground in blacks' gaining elec
tive office did not mean America
had entered a “post-racial” prom
ised land.
Indeed, Obam a’s success has
provoked an outpouring of sus
tained overt appeals to anti-black
JJtirthmb (Dhseruer
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bigotry in the political arena not
seen since George W allace’s cam
paign for the presidency in the 1960s
and 1970s.
As it was in the civil rights
years of the 1950s and 1960s, some
o f the deluge of racist comm ent
coursing through the public arena
is just politics at its most cynical.
Their spiritual ancestors are the
S ou th ern se g reg a tio n ists who
temporarily bolted the Democratic
Party to form the Dixiecrat Party in
1948 and who were to later sign
the so-called Southern m anifes
tos of 1956 opposing the Brown
decision. Perhaps the sm oothest
practitioner of that cynicism was
Sen. Jam es Eastland, the M issis
sippi Dem ocrat whose 1957 inter
view with journalist Mike Wallace
rem ains a classic justification of
segregationist politics at its most
dishonest.
But, as many of the more than
1,100 reader responses to the
Politico.com article about "The Prob
lem” now hanging in the White
House underscore, the reality of a
black American presidency has
deeply unsettled a significant mi
nority of white Americans and pro
voked them to indulge in the same
kind of illogical, vicious and bizarre
racial assertions that fueled the mobs
that tried to intimidate four little
black American girls in New Orleans
51 years ago.
That reaction indicates that, al
though the particulars of the scene
have changed, Norman Rockwell’s
“The Problem We All Live With”
continues to stand in significant
ways for the problem we all still live
with.
Lee A . Dan iels is di rector ofcom -
munications fo r the NAACP Legal
Defense and Educational Fund.
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