On July 16, 1964, The New York Times ran a story titled “A 2nd Body Is Found in the Mississippi.” A saved copy of the story, found among Rockwell’s reference materials, establishes that he had the June 21, 1964, murders in mind long before beginning work on his painting in March 1965.Īs no one had yet reported the exact details of the murder when Rockwell began his painting, he borrowed from Hector Rondon’s 1963 Pulitzer Prize–winning news photo “Aid from the Padre” for the pose of Michael Schwerner holding James Chaney. Rockwell hired local architect Tom Arienti to draft a church steeple, but later decided against including the church. His next idea was to do two separate vertical pictures- the first showing the civil rights workers and the second showing the Mount Zion Church. The young men would be pictured on the left page and Philadelphia Deputy Price and the posse of Klansmen wielding sticks (we later learned all were armed with rifles and shotguns) on the right. Rockwell conceived Murder in Mississippi as a horizontal composition to run across two pages. Their bodies were then taken to the farm of one of the Klansmen, dumped into a dam site, and covered by tons of dirt pushed over them by tractor. They were driven to a remote location and shot point blank. Once outside of town, Klansmen intercepted them and hustled them into Price’s car.
After releasing them later that night, Price tailed them. On their return to the Meridian office of Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), they were taken into custody by Deputy Sheriff Price, by some accounts for speeding and by others for supposedly setting the fire. Hearing of a Klan attack against blacks and of arson at Mount Zion Church, the three men drove to the site.
Schwerner had been targeted by the Klan for his organization of a black boycott of white-owned businesses and for his attempts to register blacks Michael Schwerner and his chief aide, James Chaney, were in Philadelphia to assist with training summer volunteers, one of whom was Andrew Goodman. In the beginning of 1965, Rockwell began work on an illustration for Look about the June 21,1964, murders of three young civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi. The Problem We All Live With and Murder in Mississippi ushered in that new era.
Later, freed from such restraints, Rockwell seemed to look for opportunities to correct editorial prejudices inadvertently reflected in previous work. In an interview later in his life, Rockwell recalled earlier having been directed by The Saturday Evening Post to remove a black person from a group picture because the magazine’s policy dictated showing black people only in service industry jobs.
The result was an intensive five-week session in which he produced charcoal preliminaries, an oil color study, and the large final painting. Veering from his habit of working on five or six projects at a time, Rockwell ignored other commissions. The anatomy of this particular work illuminates Rockwell’s process. In the 1965 painting Murder in Mississippi, he illustrated the Philadelphia, Mississippi, slaying of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney. In 1964, after The Problem We All Live With ran in Look magazine, Norman Rockwell received many letters criticizing his choice of subject, but irate opinions did not stop him from pursuing his course.