Why Norman Rockwell Left Thanksgiving Americana Behind

At this time of year, Norman Rockwell is best remembered for his iconic 1943 painting “Freedom From Want,” depicting a smiling White family gathered around a Thanksgiving turkey. But it is less well known that he decisively turned a corner just a few decades later, choosing to reject the airbrushed image of a nation implicitly populated with only happy, White, middle-class families.

Racism still has not been vanquished decades after the civil rights movement — evidence ranges from the murder trial for the killing of Ahmaud Arbery to a system of mass incarceration that locks up 1 in 3 Black men at some point in their lives. Yet Rockwell’s story is instructive, showing how America could, and can, change its attitudes about race.

Rockwell did this by abandoning his employer of nearly 50 years, the Saturday Evening Post, in large part because the magazine would let him portray Blacks only in subservient positions. After including two Black children in his 1961 illustration “Golden Rule,” Rockwell began receiving hate mail from segregationists, and the Post told him he should paint portraits only of statesmen or celebrities. Those instructions clashed with his conscience. Severing his ties with the magazine in 1963, Rockwell told his longtime editors that he had “come to the conviction that the work I now want to do no longer fits into the Post scheme.”

He joined Look magazine, and it was there that he painted some of the hardest-hitting, most widely seen visual attacks on racism in the nation’s history.

Rockwell’s first illustration for Look, published in 1964, was titled “The Problem We All Live With.” It showed the torsos of four besuited U.S. marshals escorting a 6-year-old Black girl in a white dress, Ruby Bridges, to integrate an all-White school in New Orleans, with the word “n-----” scrawled above her.

Although Rockwell and Look received a torrent of angry letters, the magazine stood by him. When one approving reader wrote, “You have just said in one painting what people cannot say in a lifetime,” Rockwell wrote back: “I just had my 70th birthday and I am trying to be a bit more adult in my work.”