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Published in Miami, Florida by Informed Decisions Publishing

www.wisdomforwork.com

ISBN: 978-0-9892601-0-7 (Electronic Format)

Note to the Reader

Whether we love his work or hate it, most of us think of Norman Rockwell as the poster child for an all-white America. I know I did. That is, until I took the uncanny journey I share with you in this book. Then I discovered a surprisingly different truth: Norman Rockwell was into multiculturalism long before the word was even invented.

Working from live models, the famous illustrator was slipping people of color (the term I use for the multi-ethnic group of Chinese and Lebanese, Navajos and African Americans the artist portrayed) into his illustrations of America from the earliest days of his career. Those people of color are still in those illustrations. They never disappeared. But the reason we don’t know about them is because, up until now, they seem to have been routinely overlooked.

For example, in her book, “Norman Rockwell’s People”, Susan E. Meyer catalogues by name over one hundred and twenty Norman Rockwell models, including two dogs, Bozo and Spot. But not one model of color is named in the book.

Another case in point? “America, Illustrated”, an article written for The New York Times by Deborah Solomon, art critic and journalist. In honor of Independence Day, the July 1, 2010 edition of the paper was dedicated to “all things American”.

“America, Illustrated” pointed out that Norman Rockwell’s work was experiencing a resurgence among collectors and museumgoers. Why? Because the illustrator’s vision of America provided “harmony and freckles for tough times.” As Solomon put it, Norman Rockwell’s America symbolized “America before the fall.” This America was, it seems, all sweetness and light. Solomon simply asserts: “It is true that his (Rockwell’s) work does not acknowledge social hardships or injustice.”

The America portrayed by Norman Rockwell was also, apparently, all white. Seven full-color reproductions of Rockwell’s work augment the multi-page Times article. The featured illustration is “Spirit of America” (1929), a 9” × 6” blow-up of one of the artist’s more “Dudley Doright”-looking Boy Scouts. None of the pictures chosen to illustrate the article includes a person of color.

This is puzzling. As an art critic, Deborah Solomon surely was aware of Norman Rockwell’s civil rights paintings. The most famous of these works, “The Problem We All Live With”, portrays a little black girl integrating a New Orleans school.

One hundred and seven New York Times readers commented on “America, Illustrated”: most of them were not happy with the article. Many remarks cited Solomon’s failure to mention “The Problem We All Live With”. One reader bluntly quipped: “The reporter (Solomon) was asleep at the switch.” The other people in Norman Rockwell’s America, the people of color, had been strangely overlooked, again.

***

This book hopes to begin to correct this oversight. It will be an eye opener for everyone who loves Norman Rockwell, everyone who hates Norman Rockwell, and for all those people in between who never thought much about Norman Rockwell because they believed Norman Rockwell never thought much about them. Hidden in Plain Sight: The Other People in Norman Rockwell’s America is dedicated to those “other people”: individuals who have been without name or face or voice for so long. And it is dedicated to Norman Rockwell himself, the “hidden” Norman Rockwell, the man who conspired to put those “other people” into the picture in the first place.

CONTENTS

Prologue

1 Early Glimpses

2 Hiding in the White House

3 The Rockwell Models of Washington County

4 Moving On: The Little Black Girl(s) in the Little White Dress

5 The Others in the Golden Rule

6 Modeling the ‘60’s

7 Coloring the Boy Scouts

8 The Navajos, the Illustrator, and Glen Canyon Dam

9 Norman Rockwell Saved My Life

10 The Whitewash

Epilogue

PROLOGUE

“Finally, someone is looking …”

Laura Claridge, Norman Rockwell biographer

A colored man is perched on top of the Statue of Liberty. Norman Rockwell put him there. But for nearly sixty-five years, no one has said a word about him.

“Working on The Statue of Liberty” appeared as the July 4th, 1946 cover for The Saturday Evening Post. The illustration portrays the famous lady being proudly refurbished by five diligent workmen. Three of the workers are white. One of the workmen is a caricature of Norman Rockwell. The fifth worker, the one next to the Rockwell look-alike, is brown.

The model for all of the figures (except the Rockwell look-alike of course) was a white Vermont construction worker named Sousy. Working from photos of Sousy, Norman Rockwell produced a series of charcoal sketches. These drawings reveal that, as “Working on The Statue of Liberty” evolved, Rockwell decided to make a statement about the American experience. He picked up a colored pencil and changed the skin tone of one man from white to brown.

Amazingly, this statement from Norman Rockwell has escaped all notice. The brown man sat unacknowledged on top of Rockwell’s Statue of Liberty for sixty-five years before I noticed him while looking for people who looked like me in Norman Rockwell’s America. Here’s how it all started …

***

October, 2009. Norman Rockwell Museum, Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Final stop of three-day road trip. Given an unseasonably frosty morning and my thinned out blood, I am bundled up like Nanook of the North.

My friend and traveling buddy Pennie Scales (a hardy Yankee farm girl, much more lightly dressed than me) proceeded directly to the main gallery. I, on the other hand, had to stop to de-mummify myself in the coat room. After piling my winter gear into a locker, I headed towards the galleries.

The main corridor of the museum opens onto a large rotunda. Coming out of the coat room into this corridor and looking straight ahead, I could see the circular visitors’ desk and beyond that, the back wall of the first gallery.

As I stuffed the locker key into my back pocket, I realized I was alone in the hallway. The visitors’ desk was virtually empty as well. But just beyond it, a noisy mass of heads and torsos pulsated, apparently gathering for a museum tour. A huge painting looked down upon the hubbub from the back gallery wall. My eyes moved up to it and I stood stock still.

Over the top of the crowd, left profile facing me, floated a dark brown forehead topped by a thick wooly braid.

My shoulders dropped. My breathing slowed. My lips released a yogic “aa-ahh”, curving into a slight smile. I felt great. And I did not have the slightest idea why.

As the tour group surged off with its docent, I moved closer to the painting. Then, there I was, standing right in front of … myself! My six-years old, 1950’s, Bridgeport, Connecticut self. Skin oiled, socks evenly folded down, white sneakers gleaming. Walking with a straight back the way numerous trips up and down our railroad apartment with Encyclopedia Britannicas on my head had taught me to do. There was my double, striding off to school in Norman Rockwell’s painting, “The Problem We All Live With.”

The docent and her ducklings were headed my way, so I tacked against the flock to the other side of the room. There I encountered a portrait of a crisply dressed African-American dining car waiter: shoes polished, uniform immaculate, dignity as well as forbearance in the smile he gives his young white customer. That waiter was my Uncle Hugh!

Well, not really. But at that moment, in my strangely-altered state, he seemed to be my Uncle Hugh.

Hugh was my mother’s oldest brother. My mother was the third youngest of thirteen children born to a somewhat self-consciously middle class black family in Baltimore, Maryland. Her big brothers were like second daddies to her, and although he died before I was born, my mother often told me stories about this favorite brother. The family was very proud of the fact that Hugh had a job as a Pullman porter, great work for a colored man in those days.

Mommy would reminisce about how sharp Hugh looked in his gleaming Pullman uniform. When he got home from a tour on the trains, Hugh would scoop up his little sister, swing her above his head until she was hysterical with giggles and then, from the deep recesses of his jacket pockets, present her with a rainbow of hard candies. I always felt a special fondness for my Uncle Hugh. And now, here he was, (or at least he seemed to be), smiling out from the Norman Rockwell painting, “Boy in a Dining Car”.

Using a dining car from the New York Central’s Lake Shore Limited as his setting, Norman Rockwell had captured a moment in his own son Peter’s life when he created the December 7, 1946 Saturday Evening Post cover, “Boy in a Dining Car”. In the illustration, a young white patron earnestly tries to calculate a tip for the smiling black waiter standing by. Ten year old Peter Rockwell himself was the model for the young patron. Norman Rockwell hired Jefferson Smith, a twenty-eight year veteran employee on the New York Central Railroad, to portray himself as the waiter in the tableau.

I looked up into the waiter’s face and smiled. “Hi, Uncle Hugh!” I whispered. “How you doin?” Then that strange feeling of relaxation flowed over me again. And this time, I knew why.

Traditionally (at least among those of us who were raised right), when one African American encounters another in a situation where we are few, some gesture of acknowledgement occurs. A head nod. Eye contact and a slight smile. A soft, “How you doin’?”

Standing in this gallery of the Norman Rockwell Museum, I realized that I had had no such interaction for three days. In all the historic sites I had visited, all the trails Pennie and I had hiked, all the gift shops we had browsed, coffee shops in which we had gossiped, in all that time and all those places, I had not seen nor been greeted by one other black person.

Now I am very used to being “the only one.” A la Ralph Ellison in his book, The Invisible Man, I have internalized my own invisibility. So three days in the Berkshires with no other black people around was not startling. What was startlingly was stumbling upon a clear presence of me and my friends and my family, thanks to Norman Rockwell!

***

Erin McLauglin, a blogger on “Teaching Digital History,” observes that, on the surface, “Boy in a Dining Car” appears to be a coming-of-age narrative. However, she continues, the work holds much deeper interpretations: “(The porter views) the young boy with compassion and patience. In this way, it is the African American man (who has the) confidence and power and in turn, he is using his power to give respect and compassion (back) to the young boy.”

Respect, compassion and patience: that was my Uncle Hugh. And Norman Rockwell had captured it all.

My mind reeled. Norman Rockwell, icon of white-on-white America, had created portrayals of black people that rang very true to me as a black person.

The docent was now concluding her tour, heading back into the gallery in which I stood. Concluding her remarks, she commented that all of Rockwell’s portrayals were drawn from live models. “Including the people of color?” I turned and asked her. “Yes,” she replied, “including the people of color.”

Questions flew around in my head. Who were these “colored” models? Where had Norman Rockwell found them? What had been the quality of their experiences with the famous illustrator? And why had Rockwell chosen to depict them at all?

Standing in front of my “Uncle Hugh” that chilly October morning, I decided to go and find out.

Chapter 1

EARLY GLIMPSES

Colored people were the topic of conversation in Norman Rockwell’s Vermont during the spring of 1946. And those conversations were not always pleasant.

In March of that year, Crystal Malone, a 19-year-old junior at the University of Vermont, Burlington, had been accepted as a pledge to the Upsilon chapter of Alpha Xi Delta sorority. Malone, a native of Washington, D.C., was black. Alpha Xi Delta, founded in 1893 in Galesburg, Illinois, had been, up until Miss Malone’s pledge, all white.

When Crystal Malone arrived as a freshman at UVM in 1943, there was only one other black student on campus. Having grown up in and been conditioned by the segregated world of Washington, Crystal never expected to be asked to join a white sorority. She was pleasantly shocked when she was.

Alpha Xi Delta’s invitation to Crystal may have been one of the outcomes of a conference held at UVM the previous November. Anti-Semitism and “anti-Negroism” were its themes. According to “The Cynic,” the UVM school paper, when the conference ended, one hundred students “thronged the lounge to elect a committee to investigate the quota system and abolish it on this campus.”

The committee met with quick success in several areas. In January, 1946, “The Cynic” proudly announced, “Henceforth, all sorority rushing will be on a basis of no racial or religious discrimination.”

Interviewed about the matter decades later, Crystal Malone Brown recalled, “When I was asked to join Alpha Xi Delta, I remember being pleased — the spoken emotions and feelings after the war (World War II) made me think it was possible.”

But it wasn’t. When Upsilon Chapter announced that it had pledged Crystal Malone, Alpha Xi Delta national president, Beverly Robinson, immediately traveled from Washington, D.C. to Burlington. Her mission: convince the black co-ed not to go through with the pledge. Sitting in a student lounge, Mrs. Robinson advised Malone, “Life is selective, and maybe it’s just as well to learn it while we are young.”

Crystal Malone declined to be de-selected. Upsilon chapter vowed to stand by their colored pledge and usher her into full sisterhood – at which point the national office of the sorority suspended the UVM chapter.

The women of Upsilon chapter appealed to the university administration for help. But university President J.S. Millis was somewhat wishy-washy concerning the controversy. According to “The Cynic,” the president’s response was, “This is a matter between the local sorority and the national.” The campus, and a good part of the state of Vermont, was thrown into an uproar.

UVM faculty and students staged massive protests, overwhelmingly in support of the young sorority women of Upsilon chapter. Life magazine sent a crew up to Burlington to cover the story, complete with photographs of Malone, a quintessential co-ed in pearls and cashmere. In the article, “Sorority Fight: Vermont Chapter Stirs Nationwide Controversy by Admitting Negro”, published May 20, 1946, the magazine smugly observes, “Last winter Life pointed out that sororities were undemocratic.”

Throughout Vermont, letters to the editor poured into local newspapers, some in support of the Upsilon chapter coeds, many, with nasty racial epithets, against. Letters poured into the office of President J.S. Millis as well, the majority of them urging him to take a strong stand in support of Crystal Malone and her soon-to-be sorority sisters. One of those letters was from one of Vermont’s most famous citizens: Norman Rockwell.

Norman Rockwell hated bigotry. Decades later, he would tell Esquire Magazine, “I was born a white Protestant with some prejudices which I am continuously trying to eradicate.”

Rockwell’s rejection of those prejudices was one of the many reasons he wasn’t close to his only sibling, Jerry. Jerry’s incessant racist jokes infuriated Rockwell. But the venom that the illustrator had witnessed oozing forth when news broke about a colored girl pledging Alpha Xi Delta? That had been worse than anything he had ever heard from Jerry.

And so Rockwell, along with his wife Mary and their friends John and Dorothy Canfield Fisher, sent UVM President J.S. Millis a statement of outrage and support: outrage at the prejudice being displayed and support for those standing up against it. The famous illustrator wanted to be sure the letter showed Malone and those spunky sorority girls that Norman Rockwell was proud to stand with them.

But President Millis did not step in and the national office of Alpha Xi Delta did not back down. So the sorority sisters of Upsilon Chapter, including Crystal Malone, who had completed her pledge and “gone over,” performed an historic act of protest: they burned their sorority charter. Doing so meant that no UVM group, including themselves, could use the name Alpha Xi Delta for five years. Knowing this, the chapter decided to close its doors, essentially saying: “if we can’t be Alpha Xi Delta with Crystal, there will be no Alpha Xi Delta.”

Crystal Malone went on to graduate as a business major with the Class of 1947 and to marry Wesley Brown, the first African-American graduate of the US Naval Academy at Annapolis. In 2008, the National Office of Alpha Xi Delta sought out Crystal Malone Brown, wishing to offer her a formal apology. As Deanna Detchemendy, then national president of the sorority recounts:

When I contacted Mrs. Brown’s daughter (Carol Jackson) with the hopes of getting in touch with Mrs. Brown and arranging a meeting at which Alpha Xi Delta would formally apologize, she shared that Mrs. Brown had generally conveyed positive memories of her relationship with Alpha Xi Delta to her children, most particularly of her Upsilon Chapter sisters who were so very supportive. And that while certainly difficult, she (Mrs. Brown) perceived the incident with our then-national officers as one that helped shaped her character in positive ways as an adult.

Detchemendy went on to say that:

Mrs. Brown was not in good health, and Mrs. Brown had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and was experiencing (and would continue to experience) related mental deterioration. Given this information, we felt that outreach to Mrs. Brown at that point and the related dredging of negative memories could easily cause more harm than good at this stressful time for the family, and so we determined to forego “closure” on our end in order to avoid opening old wounds for Mrs. Brown or her family.

Crystal Malone never modeled for Norman Rockwell. But photos in Life magazine confirm that, with her saffron-colored skin and long, silky tresses, Crystal could have portrayed Spice Mackson. Spice is the key figure in “Love Ouanga,” Rockwell’s illustration of a black Pentecostal congregation for a short story of the same name.

“Love Ouanga”

“Love Ouanga”, written by Kenneth Perkins, appeared in the June, 1936 issue of American Magazine. Set in 1930’s New Orleans, the story is a beautiful and rich reprise of La Traviata, but this time with a happy ending. And this time, the characters are all black.

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Love Ouanga by Norman Rockwell. June, 1936

***

Spice Mackson lives in a better, although not the best, part of black New Orleans, her simple cabin serving as a beauty parlor by day and a love nest for hire by night. Only two people hold the center of Spice’s love. The first is her baby boy, “one of the gods, a little one, but as real as ever her ancestors had worshipped in Guinea”: a little god, yes, but one who needs a poppa. The second is Tad Barley, scion of a prominent black New Orleans family, who is ready and willing to fill that need and marry Spice: lock, stock and baby.

The fly in the ointment is Tad’s father, Aesop Barley. A powerful precinct boss who speaks in the affected cadences of “the educated negro,” Barley Senior confidently opines that his degrees from Tuskegee Institute and Howard University have basically taken most of the African out of him. When he hears of his son’s plans to marry Spice, Aesop Barley immediately enrolls Tad in a Negro Officers’ camp in Iowa and prepares to ship him out.

Balking at the plan, Tad slips over to Spice’s place and urges her to run away with him. But Spice is determined to stay put. New Orleans is home: her beauty parlor is here, Tad’s future law career is here. If they run off, they might end up just being “cotton choppin’ Nigras.”

While Spice pleads with Tad, Aesop Bradley approaches Spice’s home. Tad sneaks out the back door as Aesop enters the front with a policeman, a social worker and a court order to take away the baby. The order stipulates that if Spice leaves town and stays out for three years, the child will be returned to her.

The mother’s wails bring neighbor women swarming into the cabin. They offer her water but she asks for, and gets, gin. When the commiserating assembly then asks Spice what she plans to do, she responds, “I’m goin to a prayer meeting.”

***

The congregation of “Blood of The Lamb” church consisted of thirty decidedly down-and-outblack folks worshiping in a decidedly down-and-out part of New Orleans. One member of this flock, however, was very well known, revered, and at times feared, in all parts of town. Her name was Swamp Suzanne.

Swamp Suzanne, although a dedicated participant in the energetic Christian worship of “Blood of the Lamb,” was also a powerful voodoo priestess. Her praying could flip from the God of Israel to the gods of Guinea in a heartbeat. Suzanne’s ability to assemble ouangas, compilations of rituals and potions that hypo-charged her prayers, was legendary. Spice Mackson headed straight down to the Wednesday night prayer meeting of “Blood of the Lamb.” She intended to get Swamp Suzanne “to pray for old Barley a whole lot.”