The granddaughter of Norman Rockwell slammed Donald Trump’s administration for “promoting this segregationist view of America” through its use of her grandfather’s iconic work.
“Norman Rockwell was antifa,” Daisy Rockwell explained to The Bulwark, referring to the umbrella term that’s become a right-wing bogeyman of sorts to refer to left-wing activism.
(Antifa is a decentralized, progressive movement that opposes fascism and racism. Trump designated it as a “domestic terrorist organization” in September following the assassination of Charlie Kirk.)
Her comments follow several instances where the Department of Homeland Security used paintings by her grandfather — who famously depicted the “Four Freedoms” and tackled racism, violence and segregation in his work — to call on people to “defend” and “protect our American way of life” amid its mass deportation agenda.
One of Norman Rockwell’s most iconic paintings depicts Ruby Bridges, the first Black student to attend a whites-only school in Louisiana, being escorted by U.S. marshals as they walk past a racist slur written on a wall.
In an opinion piece for USA Today last month, Daisy Rockwell and other family members stressed that, if the artist were still alive, he’d be “devastated” to see that the problem Bridges confronted still plagues society decades later and that his work “has been marshalled for the cause of persecution toward immigrant communities and people of color.”
Rockwell told The Bulwark that her family was “upset” by the posts as her grandfather “was really very clearly anti-segregationist.”
In a 1962 interview, the artist explained, “I was born a white Protestant with some prejudices that I am continuously trying to eradicate. … I am angry at unjust prejudices, in other people and myself.”
Last month, Daisy Rockwell and other family members declared that it’s time to follow in the artist’s footsteps and “stand for the values he truly wished to share with us and all Americans: compassion, inclusiveness and justice for all.”
