The Norman Rockwell Painting That Changed the Internet For Me
When I was growing up, my folks had a book of Norman Rockwell paintings that had been featured on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. You've seen many of them. I looked at the book many times and the paintings had a special familiarity to me. In 2010, a traveling exhibition of Rockwell's work came to the North Carolina Museum of Art, about 75 miles from home. My mother bought tickets for my then wife and I to see the exhibit. I'm not really an art museum kind of guy but these paintings help a special place in my heart ever since my childhood and I was excited to go.
I saw many of his famous paintings; Freedom From Want shows a woman serving Thanksgiving turkey. Rosie the Riveter shows a working woman from WW2 against an American flag. There's a painting of a girl in pigtails sitting outside the principals office with a black eye and an image of little Ruby Bridges being escorted by US Marshalls into an all-white school.
At the very end of the exhibit, off to the side was a single painting by itself in a little dimly lit alcove. I went over to see it and it was one I was unfamiliar with. It showed three young men. One lie dead on red Mississippi clay. One was on his knees clutching at the third who held him while looking defiantly at an unseen group of gunmen. The painting was Murder in Mississippi and it depicted the last moments of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, three civil rights workers murdered by the Ku Klux Klan during the Freedom Summer of 1964 near Philadelphia, Mississippi.
Never before in my life have I been as affected I was by a work of art as I was by this painting. It instantly brought tears to my eyes, and it felt like I had been punched in the stomach. It was truly a moment I will never forget. When I got home, I read everything I could about the murders and the men who committed them, a widely known bunch which included active law enforcement. I learned than when that son of a bitch Ronald Reagan announced his run for the presidency, he went to Philadelphia, Mississippi to do it and while he was there, he talked about "States Rights," code for ant-Civil Rights policy.
Several years later, in 2017, I saw an article that was illustrated with a poster made during the time that Schwerner, Cheney and Goodman were missing. Their bodies were not found for 44 days after their June 21st murder. Two years prior, Dylan Roof, a neo-Confederate racist had killed 9 people at a Black Church in Charleston. My wife and I had recently found KKK literature at a campground where we stayed. There was talk of a planned rally in Charlottesville, VA by the so called alt-right angry over the planned removal of a statue by a confederate general. All of the prompted me to post Rockwell's painting on my Facebook page.
This is how I captioned it:
This is a Norman Rockwell painting called Murder in Mississippi. It depicts the final moments in the lives of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, three civil rights workers killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan 53 years ago this summer for registering people to vote. That's not ancient history. It's not even history. It's current events.
It was about 4:00 in the afternoon on August 5th. By the next morning the post had been shared 20,000 times. I'd never experienced anything like that and I'd been on Facebook for about 10 years. I had between 200-300 friends there. I started getting friend requests from all over the world. I thought ,"What the hell" and I started accepting some of them, often from people who messaged me. I heard from numerous people who lived in the area of the murders and who knew James Chaney. I heard from other people who know the other two victims who were from up North. I also heard from lots and lots of pissed off white people who wanted to know why I was digging up ancient history. How could I claim the Klan still existed? Many people doubted that the painting was done by Rockwell and called me a liar, but that particular slur was easy to disprove since the Norman Rockwell Museum in Massachusetts had on online display about it.
A week after I posted the painting, the Charlottesville rally happened and a young anti-fascist demonstrator named Heather Heyer was killed by a White Nationalist named James Fields. People started sharing the painting and what I'd written all over again and the count eventually surpassed 90,000. The right-wingers brigaded Facebook, saying that this Norman Rockwell painting violated community standards for violent content and Facebook, being the moral cowards that they are put an "objectionable content" warning that people had to click through to see it.
Within a couple of months I left social media and didn't sign back on for nearly a year. I didn't have the desire to defend being an anti-racist over and over and over. Some people on the side of goodness and light mistakenly thought I had way more influence than I had in real life and the requests I received from them were hard to turn down with the explanation that I was just a regular guy from North Carolina who did nothing more than share a piece of art that meant a lot to him.
When I finally returned to social media the next year, the furor was over and I had the benefit of having met online a large group of people sympathetic to civil rights, with an appreciation of history. In the end, it was all worth it.
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