Two young people were shot in the last few days in two different states for mistaking the address they were looking for. I took a short walk and found myself thinking about a print I own of a famous painting you’ve probably seen. A federal judge ordered New Orleans public schools to admit Ruby Bridges, a six-year-old African-American girl, into the first grade in what had been an all-white school. Norman Rockwell made a picture of her, in pigtails and a white dress, with four faceless federal marshals walking her to school with smashed tomatoes dripping on the concrete wall behind her. New Orleans parents refused to send their children, so Ruby would be alone in the school, and New Orleans hired a teacher, Barbara Henry, from Boston.
Ruby first realized she was famous a decade later when she saw the picture. Rockwell had made a two page spread, titled The Problem We All Live With, for a magazine that circulated all over the country. It was in our homes and doctors’ offices and would have been hard to miss. Seeing it, Ruby realized she had a mission.
The Rockwell Museum brought Ruby to speak a few years ago along with Ms. Henry, who’d come to New Orleans to teach her first grade. They had a reunion, both spoke and Ruby signed her book about what happened. It was a privilege to meet them and of course we bought the book.
Rockwell’s title, The Problem We All Live With, is so apt. Yes, we ALL live with it. African-Americans live with the sense of risk 24/7. Those of us who believe in a fair and decent world where “no distinction would be tolerated in this purified republic but what arose from merit and conduct,”[1] are revolted and disturbed by abuse of people no matter who it’s aimed at.
Some of us learned from Hitler that hatred is indiscriminate, unreasonable and universally dangerous. Some of us also learned from history that none of us are safe from hatred, that human rights are must be universal or they’re totally unreliable. Some of us learned the same lesson from the Ku Klux Klan here whose hatred includes Blacks, Jews and Catholics. Some of us understand that we’re less safe in a world where we demonize other peoples.
My wife and I played small parts in the Civil Rights Movement: she and friends integrated a Greensboro, North Carolina movie theatre. I heard Martin Luther King describe his dream on the national mall in Washington and volunteered in the NAACP’s law office. Stunningly, the movement did its best to train and discipline demonstrators never to respond to abuse with abuse. John Lewis, the Freedom Riders who went South in integrated buses, and many others, took incredible abuse, some killed, others sustaining permanent injuries, but were taught not to fight back. The nonviolent lesson King and others inherited from Mahatma Gandhi, included nonresistance to violence, to show other Americans where the violence was coming from and the complete peacefulness of the demonstrators, both African-American and white.
By the time of King’s assassination and afterward, some of the organizations abandoned those ideals. It’s hard to blame them. How much must one absorb without fighting back? For those whites who don't yet understand their self-interest in civil rights, let me add that if we expect a future in which we too are treated with proper concern and respect, we all have to be the principle we want others to absorb, and to reign in those who want to use guns to act out their fears and prejudices. We have to be one country, with liberty and justice for all.
[1] Thaddeus Stevens, a Pennsylvania congressman and a Republican leader in the fight for the 14th Amendment, in the House of Representatives, Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 3148 (1866) (June 13, 1866).
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
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