Norman Rockwell

Popular artist Norman Rockwell made this painting of Ruby Bridges, the six-year-old African American girl who was escorted by U.S. Marshals into an all-white school in New Orleans as part of desegregation legislation. Originally published in the January 14, 1964, issue of Look magazine, the painting was installed in the White House outside the Oval Office of President Barack Obama for several months in 2011.

This iconic image is probably familiar to you. The artist, Norman Rockwell, known for his warm celebration of small-town and family life, addressed the far more volatile subject of desegregation in the mid-1960s in this depiction of an African American girl, seen in silhouette, surrounded by federal marshals as she makes what would otherwise be a simple walk to school. Rockwell’s use of color dramatizes the black-white tension, which is further heightened by the barely legible derogatory word scrawled on the wall and punctuated by the red splat of a thrown tomato. This work raises many questions, such as whether the marshals are protecting Ruby or boxing her in. What is the significance of depicting them without heads and faces? What is “the problem” in Rockwell’s title: Racism? Segregation? Race relations? Does the phrase “we all live with” suggest that we should just live with it, as the saying goes, or is Rockwell suggesting that we “all” bear responsibility for addressing or resolving “the problem”? The fact that the first African American president paid tribute to the painting adds to the authority of this visual text as a symbol of the civil rights movement in America. How does President Obama’s action change or contribute to your interpretation of the painting?

Like the painting just discussed, fiction can comment indirectly on social and political issues. Let’s look at a short story by Edward P. Jones.