Norman Rockwell's Rhetorical Impact on the Civil Rights

I remember in high school my teacher handing out political cartoons every week in class, but when I looked at them, it was for maybe 30 seconds, and then I began to do something else. After reading Victoria Gallagher & Kenneth S. Zagacki’s “Visibility and Rhetoric: The Power of Visual Images in Norman Rockwell’s Depictions of Civil Rights” I wish I had taken more time to appreciate what these pictures evoked and made visible for me.

Scholars around the world agree that throughout the 1950’s and 1960’s, visual and media related arts were what influenced the rate that social activists could make a difference for social change. People like Norman Rockwell and Martin Luther King, Jr impacted the world through their strong and loud statements they made through art. “As Laurie Norton Moffatt puts it, Rockwell appeared to share with the publishers of the Saturday Evening Post ‘‘a morality based on popular values and patriotism, a morality that yearns above all for goodness to trump evil.’’ Rockwell painted pictures of that displayed the American Dream perfectly. Pictures of family, sporting events, holidays, and American ideals were painted for the Saturday Evening Post and shown to the world for everyone to see.

However, during the 1960’s Rockwell’s job with the Saturday Evening Post would end because he decide he wanted to impact the civil rights act and begin to drawl striking pictures of segregation and racial conflict. The Saturday Evening Post disagreed and wouldn’t allow colored people on the cover, so Norman Rockwell took his work to the magazine called Look. Gallagher and Zagacki speak of three figures published in Look done by Rockwell. These pictures are a few examples of how loudly Rockwell’s work spoke Rhetorically for the Civil Rights movement. However, Gallagher and Zagacki explain that the Rhetorical Critics of this era focused mainly on civil rights leaders and speeches, and how Rockwell’s work was never recognize for the same effect. Rockwell’s work speaks rhetorically by presenting a visual form of the attitudes, arguments, and ideas in the form of a picture. Through rhetorical evaluation of his work, we can “articulate and to shape public knowledge through offering interpretive and evaluative versions of who does what to whom, when, and where. “ Where Martin Luther King, Jr presented arguments through speech, Rockwell presented arguments through his art that demonstrated the value every individual holds. Most white rhetorical author depicted black people through images that made them inferior or different classes of beings, where as Rockwell steered away from pictures of peaceful patriotic Americana, and dove into a dramatic style to impact social change.

Gallagher and Zagacki came up with three reasons for why Norman Rockwell’s work achieves rhetorical significance. First, how avoids caricatures, to display the black culture in their real form, the same as whites. Second, he displayed the large array of obstacles and confrontation that black people in America dealt with. Lastly, his paintings were displayed during the heart of Civil Rights period where his paintings highlighted the disharmony of the American Society.

Norman Rockwell’s Civil Rights paintings were extremely significant to those who viewed them. The bold pictures printed in every magazine, and newspaper were filled with such great detail and thought that his pictures spoke a thousand words. They removed people from their limited ideals of the world and compelled them to see the world in a different light. The rhetorical power that is withheld in every painting of Norma Rockwell is truly significant. His artwork influenced the growth of America by providing realistic ideas through his loud work, which forced Americans to listen.

Work cited
Gallagher, Victoria, and Kenneth Zagacki. "Visibility And Rhetoric: The Power Of Visual Images In Norman Rockwell's Depictions Of Civil Rights." Quarterly Journal Of Speech 91.2 (2005): 175-200. Communication & Mass Media Complete. Web. 28 Nov. 2011.