One of the best-known American painters of the twentieth century, Norman Rockwell produced more than 300 covers for the Saturday Evening Post, a popular bimonthly magazine, between 1916 and 1963. Unlike the abstract expressionists who enthralled the art establishment in the 1940s and 1950s, Rockwell believed that paintings should tell stories: His patriotic, sentimental, and often humorous works examined the everyday lives of ordinary Americans.

In 1963, Rockwell parted company with the Post, which had begun to favor pictures of celebrities over Rockwell’s common-man covers and resisted Rockwell’s growing desire to comment on social problems through his art. Look magazine proved more receptive and, in January 1964, published The Problem We All Live With, one of a number of Rockwell’s paintings exploring civil rights, poverty, and other social issues.

The oil painting captured one moment in the tortured process of school desegregation. After six years of resistance to Brown, the New Orleans school board reluctantly began integration of its schools in 1960, starting with the first grade, with just two schools, and with only a handful of black children. Encouraged by the local NAACP, three African American girls enrolled in one school, and Ruby Bridges, the subject of Rockwell’s painting, was sent to another all-white school. Federal marshals escorted her through hostile crowds, and white mothers, who were part of those mobs, rushed to take their own children out of school. Bridges, whose family faced economic retaliation, spent her first-grade year as the only student in her class.

Rockwell’s painting compels the viewer to focus on young Ruby, who is placed near the center of the piece, a small, solitary figure. She appears dressed in her Sunday best, carrying her school supplies and a posture of determination. While a news photograph showed her dressed in a plaid dress and black shoes, Rockwell painted her clothed in all white. Why might he have taken liberties with reality, and what does his use of the color white for her clothes convey to the viewer?

With the marshals headless and dressed in neutral colors, viewers’ eyes are drawn to Ruby, to the tomatoes splattered on the wall and ground, and to the word written on the wall. Why do you think Rockwell used inanimate objects to depict the screaming mob? Notice that something is sticking out of the first marshal’s pocket, most likely the federal court order that ordered New Orleans to comply with the Brown decision. What is the effect of depicting the scene without the federal marshals’ heads?

Rockwell’s work became an iconic representation of the civil rights movement and hung in the White House in 2011.

SOURCE: Printed by permission of the Norman Rockwell Family Agency. Copyright © 2014 the Norman Rockwell Family Entities.

Questions for Consideration

Connect to the Big Idea

What areas of public life, in addition to education, did civil rights activists target in the 1950s?