I am staunchly “woke,” and there’s a guy who has my gratitude for reminding me of it every day.
This would be Norman Rockwell, the late “illustrator” once disdained by many a critic, but whose reputation as a legitimate artist has strengthened considerably over the decades.
The reasons I admire Rockwell are many, one being that in 1957 he painted an amusing picture of Red Sox regulars, including Ted Williams, suspiciously eyeballing a newly arrived rookie in the spring training locker room.
A reproduction hangs on a wall in my home office, but the original provides an idea of how Rockwell’s work is now valued: In 2014 “The Rookie” sold at auction for more than $22 million.
Commissioned for the cover of the Saturday Evening Post, the work reflects only the lighter side of Rockwell.
Much deeper is a print in our living room – above the TV screen where it invites high attention – of what Rockwell titled “The Problem We All Live With.”
It shines light on a meaner side of our national history – the day in 1960 that four U.S. marshals had to escort a 6-year-old Black girl, Ruby Bridges, into a previously all-white New Orleans school.
A parental boycott ensued, and Bridges spent her first year there alone in her classroom with teacher Barbara Henry, from Boston, new to the school system and the only person willing to teach little Ruby.
Bridges, who still lives in New Orleans, recalled as an adult, “Even though there were mobs outside that school every day for a whole year, the person that greeted me every morning was a white woman who risked her life as well.”
Painted for the former Look magazine, Rockwell’s image is a powerful reminder of ingrained bigotry. Even now, so many decades later, Florida schools will teach that Blacks benefited from enslavement because bondage gave them job skills. And closer to home, white nationalist hate literature has been distributed in several Rhode Island communities.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who soils the American presidency even by aspiring to it, is making a political career of mocking Americans whose distaste for intolerance annoys him.
“Woke” has become his go-to word, but he didn’t invent it; it has long been used in Black culture to warn against antipathy in the face of bigotry.
As far back as the 1930’s, folk and blues singer Huddie Ledbetter – better known as Lead Belly – warned fellow Blacks to “Stay woke” against racism.
Going back much further, Sept. 17 will mark 185 years since fugitive slave and abolitionist Frederick Douglass made the first of his many visits to Newport, in 1838.
Douglass attended rallies and made speeches around Rhode Island against a proposed new state constitution that would have denied voting rights to Blacks.
He found local support, and in a later autobiography said of those who backed him in Rhode Island, “The public mind was awake.”
As for Rockwell’s painting in Look, it drew both vitriol and praise.
One letter-writer declared, “Anybody who advocates, aids or abets the vicious crime of racial integration is nothing short of a traitor to the white race.”
Another wrote the opposite: “I am saving this issue for my children with the hope that by the time they become old enough to comprehend its meaning, the subject matter will have become history.”
Despite legal advances since, we all know that’s not the way things have worked out in practice.
Rockwell was a gifted artist and Douglass a skilled orator, but for advice on “The Problem We All Live With,” I’ll stick with Lead Belly’s homespun admonition:
Stay woke.
Gerry Goldstein (gerryg76@verizon.net), a frequent contributor, is a retired Providence Journal editor and columnist.
Norman Rockwell has a significant local connection: Many of his original works are owned and exhibited by the National Museum of American Illustration at 492 Bellevue Ave. in Newport. According to co-founder Judy Goffman Cutler, the museum is under renovation and currently open only by appointment. The telephone number is 401-851-8949.
The original “Problem We All Live With” is part of the permanent collection at the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass.
