Norman Rockwell painting sends rare White House message on race
President Barack Obama has taken a decidedly low-key approach to
racial issues since he became America’s first black president
two years ago. But in a hallway outside the Oval Office, he has
placed a head-turning painting depicting one of the ugliest
racial episodes in U.S. history. Norman Rockwell’s “The Problem
We All Live With,” installed in the White House last month,
shows U.S. marshals escorting Ruby Bridges, a 6-year-old
African-American girl, into a New Orleans elementary school in
1960 as court-ordered integration met with an angry and defiant
response from the white community.Continue Reading The thrust of
the painting is not subtle. America’s vilest racial epithet
appears in letters several inches high at the top of the canvas.
To the left side, the letters “KKK” are plainly visible. The
crowds, mostly women who gathered daily to taunt Bridges as she
went to a largely empty school, are not shown in the picture.
But the racist graffiti