Murder in Mississippi, as named by the artist, is a 1965 painting by Norman Rockwell which was commissioned for an article titled "Southern Justice" in the American magazine Look. The painting depicts the 1964 murders of civil rights activists James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, and was intended to illustrate an article written on the murders by civil rights attorney Charles Morgan Jr.[1] The painting is oil on canvas 53 × 42 inches (134.5 × 106.5 cm), and also has a pencil on board study of the same title,[2] both of which reside in the collections of the Norman Rockwell Museum.
Development of the painting
Murder in Mississippi (study) a.k.a. Southern Justice
Originally Murder in Mississippi was to fill two pages; with the victims on left page and the murderers, Deputy Price and the klansmen, on the right page. Pencil sketches were made for both panels. A preparatory study in black and white shows the complete horizontal picture with Price pointing a pistol, and several klansmen with sticks (incorrectly, as they were later found to have had rifles). On the bottom left hand corner another klansman is featured – making the three young men surrounded. However, when reduced to the left page only, the murderers on both sides of the young men were removed, leaving only the shadows cast from the group on the right.
The left panel was submitted as a rough oil color sketch to Look magazine's art director Allen Hurlburt. Based on the oil sketch Look gave Rockwell the okay to proceed and finish the painting. However, later when Hurlburt received the finished painting he decided that the more impressionistic sketch suited the article better and the finished painting was not published.[3] This was the only time that one of Rockwell's sketches was published instead of his finished painting. Rockwell's oil sketch had only taken an hour, though Rockwell himself later admitted that by the time he finished the final painting, "all the anger that was in the sketch had gone out of it."[4]
The composition of Murder in Mississippi is similar to Aid from the Padre, a 1962 photograph taken during El Porteñazo in Venezuela.[5] Schwerner and Chaney are posed similar to a priest and a wounded soldier in the photograph.[6]
The oil sketch for Murder in Mississippi is also known as Southern Justice after the title of the article where it appeared instead of the finished painting on June 29, 1965.[7] The sketch is oil on board, 15" × 12¾", and, like the painting, is held in the permanent collection of the Norman Rockwell Museum.
^Blake, Casey Nelson (2007). The Arts of Democracy: Art, Public Culture, and the State 2007. Woodrow Wilson Center Press. p. 66. ISBN9780812240290. ... explicitly political statements, as in the powerful civil rights illustrations commissioned for Look magazine (The Problem We All Live With, January 14, 1964, and Southern Justice, June 29, 1965, accompanying attorney Charles Morgan Jr.
^Sletcher, Michael (2004). New England. Greenwood Press. p. 56. ISBN0313332665. Southern Justice (1965), which also appeared in Look, he depicted the murders of Andrew Goodman, Michael ...
^Chapman, Roger (2010). Culture Wars: An Encyclopedia of Issues, Viewpoints, and Voices. M. E. Sharpe. p. 478. ISBN9780765622501. The following year, the magazine published Southern Justice (which Rockwell called Murder in Mississippi), a reaction to the previous summer's murder of three civil rights activists in Philadelphia, Mississippi. The painting depicts two men, a white and a black, comforting each other with a fallen comrade at their feet.
