The Problem We All Live With is a painting by Norman Rockwell in 1964. The painting holds Ruby Bridges walking to school with her bodyguards of the Deputy of U.S. Marsh after she'd been integrated to a white's only school. In the background one can clearly see the word " Nigger" roughly sketched in a cream deteriorated wall. The cream wall is stain by a tomato that now lies in the floor thrown by an ignorant fool at Ruby for coming to a "white" school.
The four white bodyguards stand guard because people were not only throwing tomatoes at Ruby but held signs and cursed threatening her to come to her home and kill her or poison her food. Some of them even taking it to extreme measures and making black dolls to place in coffins. Even if Ruby was scared she had a determined look upon her face. She is seen wearing white attire; white dress, white shoes, white socks, even a white band around her braided hair symbolizing peace and equality.
She had to go to the "white's" only school all alone because the ignorant fools parents of white children did not want their kids hanging around with a black person and preferred to have the kid stay home and not learn anything or be home schooled. They wanted this because the had lived in segregation for so long that they didn't know any better and they had recently passed a law that would not allow any more of it making segregation illegal.
Although Ruby's face can show determination and fear she is mostly overcome by the determination part, determination for equal right, determination for a better chance of learning for everyone, determination to how that their is nothing wrong with being of a different skin tonality, that people should "not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character" (Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, I have a dream speech).
In a very faint color in the same deteriorated wall full of cracks and the huge font "nigger" is etched the shortened term for the Ku Klux Klan (K.K.K.).
At first glace any person would think "oh! What a poor little girl, so young and being escorted to school, those were harsh times." Although at first it might seem like this there is more to the picture than what was just said. The cream wall represents the "whites" and their ways from the time era and how they treated others that deep down were like them. The K.K.K. is there as well as nigger and the tomato stain with the wall cracking to show how the words and their actions could be used against them "breaking" the wall of ovlibiousness that clouded their minds fro the cruelty and suffering.
For other analizis of Problem We All Live With go to Middle Minds.
