“The Problem We All Live with”: The Story behind the Artwork

By: Aiyanna Bailey

The painting, “The Problem We All Live With”, is one of the most famous paintings in modern American history, but many people don’t really know the story behind this masterpiece. 

This piece is a mural, representing the six mile long walk an eight year old Ruby Bridges had to walk every day to get to school. At such a young age, Ruby already became one of the most historic activists that the Southern part of the United States had seen at that time, simply because she wanted the right to go to school. 

At this point in time, Ruby lawfully had the right to attend public education. However, many white Southerners believed that it was wrong to have a black child attend school among the white children of the community. 

Every day, Ruby had to walk six miles to school with Federal Marshals around her. Every day on her way to school, Ruby encountered enraged white citizens, who prompted to threaten her, call her racial slurs, and even threw things at her (such as the tomato you can see near Ruby in this painting). Ruby herself persevered and wasn’t intimidated by these crowds until she saw a woman holding a black doll in a coffin in front of Ruby’s face. 

Ruby’s family suffered tremendously from her involvement in this movement. Bridges’s father was fired from his job. Bridges’s mother was refused at many businesses, notably at grocery stores. Bridges’s elderly grandparents were kicked off their sharecropping farm, where they had worked and owned land for generations. 

Despite the challenges, Ruby knew what she was doing was going to help children everywhere to accomplish what she was setting out to do.

Ruby persisted and did not miss a single class in her first school year. In the following years, Ruby would see other African American students begin to join her school, and by the time that she graduated from the elementary school, she would see classes full of African American students just like her. 

Then afterwards, Ruby graduated from a desegregated high school, where she saw her four nieces later attending the elementary school where she had broken barriers. 

Now, every colored child in the nation has the right to go to school and learn, blazed by Ruby Bridges, who is currently a very successful businesswoman and mother. 

The painting, which was drawn in Bridges honor, is now one of the most recognizable pieces in modern American history, showing the whole world the struggle colored children once had faced for the simple right to go to school. 

This November 14, join Hollister High School students in walking for Ruby Bridges in support of the African American educational community! 

We hope to see you there!

Image Credit: Norman Perceval Rockwell (1894-1978) "The Problem We All Live With," 1963, Look Magazine, January 1964. Story Illustration, Oil on Canvas 36 x 58 inches. Collection of the Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts