The Problem We All Live With: The Story of an Iconic Illustration

Barbara-Shae Jackson, PhD, led the project’s New Orleans community0based research, serving as primary interviewer and cofacilitator of workshops. A research scientist with  Slover Linett at NORC at the University of Chicago, she holds a PhD in cognitive psychology from the University of Alabama, where her dissertation explored how aesthetic experience, cognition, race, and racism intersect. At Slover Linett at NORC, Jackson partners with cultural organizations to deepen connections with marginalized communities. She designs and leads mixed-methods research that amplifies marginalized voices—boldly, authentically, and with intentionality. She equips cultural institutions to advance equity by making space for diverse storytelling toward the goal of both narrative and narrator change. 

Eric Seiferth is curator and historian at the Historic New Orleans Collection (HNOC). He is the project lead on the NOLA Resistance initiative to preserve and share stories of the New Orleans Civil Rights Movement, and lead curator of the associated exhibition The Trail They Blazed. He was also lead curator of the award-winning exhibition Captive State: Louisiana and the Making of Mass Incarceration. He earned his BA and MA in American history from Tulane University. 

Margot Yale served as project research advisor. In this role, she authored biographical sketches of the New Orleans Four, conducted archival research and interviews in New Orleans, evaluated existing scholarship on the racialized history of public education in New Orleans, and developed a corresponding timeline of the 1960 school desegregation crisis. She also researched how the story told about the Rockwell painting has evolved since its creation. Yale is currently an Andrew W. Mellon Fellow in the modern and contemporary art department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and an independent curator with a community-based practice. She is a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California, where her dissertation examines why leftist women artists sought out institutional support from multiracial labor schools in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s.