The Problem We All Live With was painted by a man with the name of Norman Rockwell in January of 1964. The scene of the painting, The Problem We All Live With is of a six-year-old African American girl by the name of Ruby Bridges who held her head up high while walking to school. She walked in her own way in a little white dress to her new School, the William Frantz School which was an all white school in the Deep South of the United States. On the wall next to Ruby Bridges there is the word “Nigger” written in black faded paint with a splatter of tomato juice. The tomato lies on the floor after the missed attempt of hitting Ruby. He also added three K’s standing for Ku Klux Klan on the top left corner.
The Problem We All Live With is a painting that needs interpretation to be able to understand what it means. It isn’t a simple painting of a flower that you can just grasp its meaning and you have the image of it in your mind. This painting takes a lot of thinking and analyzing before somebody can have the clear picture in their minds and realize what Norman Rockwell is trying to tell us through this painting. The viewers who look at this painting must feel shock and disbelief from the fact that a young African America girl is walking to school between four guards, and having tomatoes thrown at her because of her race. This concept is hard for me to understand, because I do not believe color makes us different.
Norman Rockwell created The Problem We All Live With with very somber colors like browns and beige. The brightest color on the canvas is the red from the tomato which was thrown at Ruby Bridges. What stands out the most is Ruby’s white clean pressed dress as a contrast on her very dark skin. Norman Rockwell was inspired to paint a painting of Ruby Bridges because he said “It’s wrong, and I’m going to say that it’s wrong.” (Clutch website). He found Ruby’s situation the most powerful of all six students. Of the six, Ruby was the only one to go to this school and all the parents of the white students picked up their children from school in protest, so Ruby spent the year by herself in class.
My perspective of the painting The Problem We All Live With is that it is hard to understand, and hard to believe people were discriminated and African Americans were treated so differently just because of the color of their skin. In Norman Rockwell painting I can see that Ruby wasn’t paying any attention to her surroundings, her mind was focused on what was coming, going to school. She looked in front of her as she walked and was probably very scared because she had no idea what might happen once she got to her all white school.
