Belleville News-Democrat’s cartoonist Glenn McCoy made some waves yesterday with his latest political cartoon.

The image shows Education Secretary Betsy DeVos being escorted inside a school with four large security guards around her – a direct connection the iconic 1963 Norman Rockwell painting, “The Problem We All Live With,” featuring Ruby Bridges.

McCoy changed Rockwell’s painting by removing the n-word in the background and replacing it with “conservative.” And the KKK acronym is replaced with NEA, the National Education Association, which is the largest teachers’ union in the U.S.

McCoy said the cartoon “was about how, in this day and age, decades beyond the civil rights protests, it’s sad that people are still being denied the right to speak freely or do their jobs or enter public buildings because others disagree with who they are or how they think.”

The cartoonist was surprised people would find “hate” in the image. McCoy added, “I thought I was speaking out against hate. It’s a woman passively walking while being protected from angry protesters. Isn’t that what went down the other day when DeVos visited a school to do her job? You may disagree with her on issues but I didn’t see any hate coming from her. I did, however see hate going in the other direction which is what made me think of the Rockwell image. That was the only comparison I was drawing. The level of toxicity in today’s political climate has reached ridiculous levels.”