Mick Hartley

With President Obama at last getting some credit, albeit reluctant, for his policy on Libya, attention will be turning now to his official unveiling of the Martin Luther King memorial on Sunday.

No doubt he and his speech writers will have been working hard to come up with something appropriate. Some stirring rhetoric in the MLK spirit? Well maybe – Obama is no slouch himself as a speaker – but it's risky when you're dealing with probably the second greatest orator, after Lincoln, in American history. I imagine he'll be keen to avoid the charge of trying to appropriate the civil rights legacy for himself, as some kind of son-of-MLK. 

This is interesting though:

President Barack Obama has taken a decidedly low-key approach to racial issues since he became America’s first black president two years ago. But in a hallway outside the Oval Office, he has placed a head-turning painting depicting one of the ugliest racial episodes in U.S. history.

Norman Rockwell’s “The Problem We All Live With,” installed in the White House last month, shows U.S. marshals escorting Ruby Bridges, a 6-year-old African-American girl, into a New Orleans elementary school in 1960 as court-ordered integration met with an angry and defiant response from the white community….

His choice of the Rockwell painting was a more private statement. Obama has never mentioned it in a speech or public event. And while White House aides confirmed that Obama approved bringing it to the West Wing, they declined to discuss how the decision was made or why.

But in an interview with POLITICO, Bridges, now 56 and still living in New Orleans, said she began reaching out to the president last year — through Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.) and Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick — to move the painting to the White House because she believed the image would resonate with Obama…

Last month, Bridges stopped by the White House to see the painting in its new — though temporary — home.

“I think it’s fair to say that if it hadn’t been for you guys, I might not be here, and we might not be looking at this together,” Obama told her…

Video of Obama and Bridges looking at the Rockwell painting here.

The painting itself, at Wikipedia.