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CHARLESTON, S.C. – With the eyes of the nation this week on civil rights, let’s turn our focus to a painting inspired by a Louisiana event that astonished America when it came out 46 years ago.

In 1964, artist Norman Rockwell, the well-known illustrator of iconic images of the American dream, unveiled the first of his civil rights paintings, “The Problem We All Live With.” It’s very likely you have seen this painting that debuted in a two-page spread in Look magazine. It’s very different from most of Rockwell’s work.

The painting shows a full-length profile of a young black girl in a white dress and tennis shoes on a sidewalk. She’s sandwiched between two pairs of federal marshals. You can’t see the full bodies of the marshals – just from their shoulders to their shoes. Scrawled on a wall that serves as the painting’s background is the nasty word, “Nigger.” Scratched at another place is “K.K.K.” The only vivid color in the piece, marked mostly by its muted grays, tans and yellows, is the carcass of a red tomato. It lay on the ground, splattered just below where it hit the wall.

“The Problem” is a simple, but remarkable work. North Carolina artist Kenneth W. Laird, who did his master’s degree thesis on this and other paintings, calls Rockwell’s piece “arguably the single most important image ever done of an African American in illustration history.”

Part of the reason is Rockwell, himself.  Viewed during his career as a “conservative artist” whose work represented an ideal America, Rockwell left the Saturday Evening Post in 1963 after 47 years of illustrating kids at soda shops, dogs, patriotic themes, family life and other All-American subjects.

The 1960 story of how six-year-old Ruby Bridges became the first black girl in New Orleans to attend a white school inspired Rockwell, an early member of the NAACP.

In “retirement,” he started working on subjects that represented greater diversity of American life. Laurie Norton Moffatt, director and CEO of the Norman Rockwell Museum, described the artist’s move to more realistic subjects in a Sunday story in the South Florida Times:

“He was very socially concerned, but he wasn’t able to paint that in the Post because of editorial policies. I think it was very liberating for him as well to be able to paint on a wider spectrum of subjects, and [he] was particularly able to create a bridge for people to see the unfairness, the anger, the meanness and the injustices that were happening to our children all over the United States.”

Murray Tinkelman, an award-winning illustrator who is a professor emeritus at Syracuse University, highlighted the impact of “The Problem” to Laird. For the John F. Kennedy’s American public, not yet pummeled into submission by media from television, cell phones and the Internet, Rockwell was an artist “embraced by the most conservative elements in our country [who] would make these people stop and think that maybe there is a problem. And the problem is racism. Purely and simply.”

Singer Andy Williams, a Rockwell fan, noted in a book about Rockwell’s America, that the artist didn’t always paint about the happy moments in American life:  “He wasn’t afraid to show us what was happening in America – the good and the bad. His painting ‘The Problem We All Live With’ makes us feel the shame of segregation in America. It shows a young black girl being escorted by guards to an integrated school in the South, when racial segregation was the norm. I think it’s a great painting and exemplifies the greatness of Norman Rockwell.”

A framed print of this Rockwell painting has been on my office wall for several years. It’s worth looking at every day to remind us how far we’ve come … and how far we still have to go.

Photo: Visitors to the Norman Rockwell Museum look at “The Problem.” Photo by Jeremy Clowe. ©Norman Rockwell Museum. All rights reserved.

Andy Brack is publisher of Statehouse Report (www.statehousereport.com) and Charleston Currents (www.charlestoncurrents.com).  He is chairman and president of the Center for a Better South (www.bettersouth.org).

More information on this story: Ken Laird’s thoughts on the painting: http://hubpages.com/hub/The-Problem-We-All-Live-With—Norman-Rockwell-the-truth-about-his-famous-painting

Norman Rockwell Museum:  http://www.nrm.org

1. Frank Povah says:

   January 19, 2010 at 5:43 am

   We learn something every day; having grown up in Australia I knew only one facet of Rockwell. Thank you, Andy

   Reply
2. Ross from Pawleys says:

   January 19, 2010 at 8:26 am

   Thanks, Andy ~ well done. Perhaps it will benefit us all, if only today we had a universally respected artist who could express such strong emotion in such a magnificent and simple way on negative societal issues in order to bring us together ~ i.e. health care, war, poverty.

   Reply
3. Mary Civille says:

   January 19, 2010 at 8:34 am

   I saw this painting when it was first published in 1964 and again in 1999 at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. It never fails to remind me of the evil that “good” people are capable of.

   Reply
4. Ross from Pawleys says:

   January 19, 2010 at 1:32 pm

   Cheers “Marietta Mary”! You shook my memory ~ I saw it too at the High in ‘99.

   Reply
5. Kenneth Laird says:

   January 20, 2010 at 10:08 pm

   Tinkelman also states that “This painting did more for the Civil Rights cause than Picasso’s Guerinica for the Spanish people and the idea of the horrors of war.” No need to be a art historian to understand Rockwell. You cannot say that necessarily about Picasso despite his genius. “The Problem We All Live With” with it’s simplicity and attention to historical detail adds even more power and impact.Keep up the great work Andy. Glad I could help.

   Reply