The “New” Norman Rockwell Turns Toward Civil Rights

The years leading up to the publication of Norman Rockwell’s painting, The Problem We All Live With in the January 14, 1964 edition of Look magazine, were ones of heartache and reflection. After losing his first wife to a heart attack in 1959, Norman had remarried, written an autobiography, and left the job that made him a household name as the man who idealized life in America. Now, the old Rockwell of happy-go-lucky Americana was gone, replaced by a social critic, unafraid to let his brush tackle the nation’s most prominent issue: race.

The 1970 Christmas issue of Good Housekeeping said it best when, after reviewing the author’s most recent work, its editor proclaimed that there were now two Norman Rockwells. Following his wife’s death in 1959, Rockwell slowed down his output and took more time to himself. The sixty-six-year-old artist joined a weekly poetry group and began seeing a retired English teacher, Mary Leete “Mollie” Punderson. The new couple surprised the family in late 1961 when they abruptly announced their marriage.

A reinvigorated and inspired Rockwell was ready to plunge back into his work, but the American landscape he witnessed was not the same one he had once depicted. The editors at the Post, where Norman had worked for forty-six years, had also long changed, and the magazine was feeling the pinch from the new television medium garnering all the attention. There was now a push at the Post for Rockwell to do portraits of famous people, something he did not find particularly interesting.

Feeling that the magazine was interfering with his creativity and having a crisis of confidence in his nation’s direction, Rockwell let it be known he was open to a change. New magazine offers came pouring in, with Look in the lead. According to Rockwell’s autobiography, the magazine promised to let him paint “anything he wants to, in whatever way he wants to paint it, anywhere in the world.” Apart from a few freelance illustrations, Rockwell’s storied career at the Post was over.

“There was a change in the thought climate in America brought on by scientific advancements, the atom bomb, the two world wars, and Mr. Freud and psychology,” Norman stated in a 1963 speech. “Now I am wildly excited about painting contemporary subjects… pictures about civil rights, astronauts… and poverty programs.”

“I remember Pop being interested in only two political issues, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty… and the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s,” one of Rockwell’s sons would later write. “He had always felt strong about tolerance, though it shows only indirectly in his Post covers and most of his other work,  since the cover of the Post and most advertising had to be politically neutral – or rather, neutered.”

Before World War II, the American illustrator, as a rule, sparingly depicted African Americans in his paintings, a direction given to him from above. The few who did appear were often servers, porters, or background characters. Look magazine relied on photographs for its covers, so the editors’ interests were more in line with having their new artist paint images that reflected the news and feature articles contained within its pages.

With all restrictions gone, Rockwell could finally tap into what he believed to have been a particular social responsibility of any artist—what he called showing the “big picture,” a message that transcended art. Humor and innocence that once fit into the depiction of American life no longer fit the mold of the turbulent 1960s. Yet there was also hope in Rockwell’s new paintings, mainly the assertion that the American people were ready to confront the honest portrayal of race in their society.

The most potent paintings created by Norman Rockwell in the 1960s were the gentle yet assertive The Problem We All Live With (shown below), the more daring Southern Justice, and the most hopeful New Kids in the Neighborhood. Norman Rockwell, the white artist known for nostalgic American idealism, had now become an equal rights advocate.

It took only one year since signing on with Look for Norman Rockwell to paint arguably his most celebrated Civil Rights image, The Problem We All Live In. It would have been an understatement to say that it was a departure from his previous work, which hardly ever included African Americans as subjects. The image depicts a Black six-year-old girl, Ruby Bridges, on her first day in an integrated school. The flanking US Marshals and the racist graffiti-covered wall with evidence of recently thrown tomatoes heavily contrast with the young lady wearing a pretty white dress and clutching her textbooks.

It would be fitting that Rockwell chose the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education as his first subject. Historians and social critics alike point to the case as one of the primary events that jumpstarted the American Civil Rights Movement of the latter half of the twentieth century.

Ruby Bridges, the subject Norman chose for his depiction of the event, was one of the first children selected to start the process of desegregation in New Orleans. She would later say, “The girl in that painting at six years old knew absolutely nothing about racism. I was going to school that day.”

Ironically, the model for the image, like Ruby, was the only African American girl in the local elementary school in 1963 Stockbridge, Massachusetts, where Rockwell lived. The nine-year-old Lynda Gunn walked to Norman’s studio by herself every day after school for a week to pose for the pictures and sketches the artist would use to paint his famous image.

Comparing the painting to his past Post covers of idealized America, Rockwell stated, “…we pushed our problems and prejudices under the rug. Now they’re out in the open… now we can try to solve them.”

Norman Rockwell’s most daring depiction of the Civil Rights struggle, which he named Murder in Mississippi, more commonly known as Southern Justice, appeared in Look magazine’s June 29, 1965 issue. The artist once more decided to depict a specific historical event, the murders of young volunteer civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi. Like the previous one featuring Ruby’s story, the second “civil rights” painting provided a layer of realism as it depicted real people: James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman. The three activists were working for the Congress On Racial Equality (CORE), helping with voter registration, when they were arrested by a Klansmen sheriff and later driven to a remote location in the middle of the night and shot.

Rockwell designed his painting to represent the scene across two pages. On the left, the soon-to-be slain youth, and on the right, the Ku Klux Klan members and the sheriff responsible for orchestrating the event. Much like Francisco Goya’s famous 1814 depiction of the execution of Spanish resistance members at the hands of Napoleon’s forces, Rockwell’s composition places the victims in the light, in this case coming from car headlights, surrounded by darkness and their long shadows.

Ironically, when Rockwell finally submitted the finished two-panel work to the magazine’s art director, the latter instead chose to run the original left-panel sketch given to him months before to preview what the finished painting would look like. The Look magazine’s director explained that it somehow depicted more anger and frustration with the event and would thus go better with the article about the murder written to accompany it. It would be the only time in Rockwell’s career where his sketch was chosen over his finished work.

The New Kids in the Neighborhood from Look magazine’s May 16, 1967 issue subtly harkens back toward Rockwell’s old days of an idealized America. It is an image of hope for a better, color-blind American future. It is a moving day for an African American family into what is presumably a white neighborhood. We can see a skeptical neighbor looking past a not-so-subtlety-drawn curtain in the faraway window as if afraid or unwilling to accept the reality of the situation.

The local children, on the other hand, seem a little weary but not prejudiced enough to avoid the young African American boy and girl. Like his previous paintings for the Post, Rockwell hints at the meeting’s ultimate happy ending by having both groups of kids holding a baseball glove. One can tell almost instantly that this “civil rights” painting differs from the others, as it shows hope and empathy instead of hate and division. The boys will soon play baseball, and race will be forgotten. The parents might not have been ready for the change, but the kids were.

At the time of the publication, the 73-year-old Rockwell’s eyesight and general health were starting to deteriorate. Still, as the image suggested, the aging artist was becoming more hopeful for a better future. Reinvigorated by the promises of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Rockwell abandoned the civil rights topic and shifted his focus again, this time toward a better tomorrow. The work included the moon landing and the semi-autobiographical Home of Christmas, depicting his hometown. When approached to paint an image of a portrait of a US Marine in Vietnam kneeling over a severely wounded local villager during the Vietnam War conflict as controversial and divisive as the Civil Rights Movement, Rockwell turned it down.

Speaking in 1976 about moving on from his more serious works, such as the “civil rights” paintings, Norman Rockwell admitted his belief that people missed the security the past provided. His original light-topic, Americana covers were becoming popular once again. Arguably, they never stopped being his signature style and were only briefly intersected with the more serious topic of civil rights.

“These days, everyone is a little frightened, and they want those good-natured human pictures again,” the artist told Good Housekeeping magazine. When asked whether the good old days from the early years of his career were indeed any better, Rockwell replied, “Yes, I would say so. We laughed a lot more in the old days.”

While many people praised Norman Rockwell’s depiction of the Civil Rights Movement and the seriousness of his early 1960s work, most American viewership and readers longed for the artist’s happier times. Yet, although brief and minor in scope compared to his other nearly 4,000 works of art depicting small-town America, Rockwell’s short-lived flirtation with social issues had left its mark on American society and culture.

In 2011, America’s first African American president, Barack Obama, hung The Problem We All Live With in the White House to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Ruby Bridges’ brave walk to Franz Elementary School. Even decades after he died in 1978, Rockwell’s civil rights subject paintings continue to provoke thought and discussion about the ongoing struggle for racial justice in the United States—even if Rockwell himself returned to the spirit of optimism and resilience that defined much of American society in the 20th century.