Jacob Lawrence:
Migration as Masterpiece

Jacob Lawrence was born in Atlantic City in 1917. His family moved to Harlem when he was 13 — arriving at the tail end of the Renaissance, into a neighborhood that was still dense with artists, intellectuals, and cultural institutions. His mother enrolled him in an after-school arts program at the Utopia Children's House, where he came under the influence of Charles Alston — a Harlem Renaissance painter and teacher who was running community art classes out of his apartment at 306 West 141st Street, known as "306," the informal gathering place of the Harlem Renaissance's visual artists.

Alston introduced Lawrence to the work of Aaron Douglas, to African art, to the idea that geometric abstraction and social content were not opposites. He introduced him to the scholars and artists who gathered at 306: sculptor Augusta Savage, poet Langston Hughes, photographer James Van Der Zee. Lawrence grew up inside a tradition — not as a student borrowing from it but as a young artist who understood himself to be part of a living cultural project. When he began the Migration Series, he was not making something new. He was continuing something old.

Augusta Savage helped Lawrence obtain a position with the Federal Art Project of the Works Progress Administration in 1938 — a New Deal program that employed artists during the Depression. The $23 weekly stipend gave him materials and time. He spent a year in the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on 135th Street — the greatest archive of Black history in America — reading the historical record of the Great Migration. The Migration Series was the product of that research. It was not impression. It was history, filtered through a visual intelligence that had been in formation for a decade.

Lawrence painted all 60 panels of the Migration Series simultaneously — applying each color across all 60 panels before moving to the next color, ensuring perfect visual consistency across the series. The medium was casein tempera on hardboard. The palette was deliberately limited: deep blue, burnt sienna, yellow ochre, black, white. The forms were flat and geometric — figures without perspective, figures in silhouette, figures carrying suitcases and pushing through crowds. The captions were direct historical statements: "The migration of the Negro northward, 1916–1919."

Panel 1: "During World War I there was a great migration north by southern Negroes." Panel 22: "Another cause was lynching. It was found that where there had been riots, the colored people, in great numbers, left." Panel 49: "They found discrimination in the north. It was a different kind." The series did not celebrate the migration. It documented it — including the violence that drove it, the conditions of travel, the discrimination found in the north, the slow process of building community in new cities. It was, in 60 panels, what Zora Neale Hurston had tried to do in prose: a complete account of Black experience that did not simplify, did not apologize, and did not perform for white comfort.

The dealer Edith Halpert, who represented Lawrence, placed the series with Fortune magazine in 1941 — 26 panels reproduced in a special issue. It was Lawrence's first national exposure. The Museum of Modern Art and the Phillips Collection in Washington jointly purchased the series — MoMA taking the odd-numbered panels, Phillips the even. The two halves were not exhibited together in their entirety until 1993 — 52 years after they were painted, at a time when the Great Migration had already ended and the communities it created were being abandoned by urban policy again.

The Migration Series was not Lawrence's first historical series. Between 1937 and 1941, he had already completed series on Toussaint L'Ouverture (41 panels, 1937–38) — the leader of the Haitian Revolution — and on Frederick Douglass (32 panels, 1938–39) and Harriet Tubman (31 panels, 1939–40). Each series used the same formal language as the Migration: flat geometric forms, limited palette, direct caption text. Each insisted that these figures deserved the same sustained visual attention that European history painters gave to their subjects.

The choice of Toussaint L'Ouverture was significant. L'Ouverture led the only successful slave revolt in history — the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, which established Haiti as the first Black republic in the Western Hemisphere. American art history had not told this story. European art history had not told this story. Lawrence told it in paint at the age of 21. The implication was clear: if Black history had not been painted, it was not because it was not worth painting. It was because the painters who controlled the institutions had not chosen to paint it. Lawrence was making the opposite choice, one series at a time.

These series were not acquired by major museums when Lawrence painted them. They circulated through Black colleges and community organizations — the Harlem YMCA, Howard University, Dillard University. The institutional art world was not ready for Black history as serious art. The Black institutional world was, and it held the work until the mainstream caught up.

In 1949, Lawrence voluntarily checked himself into Hillside Hospital in Queens, New York — suffering from what he described as severe depression. He was 32 years old and had been under continuous creative and financial pressure since his teens. He spent nine months in the hospital. During that time, he painted a series of 11 works about his experience of psychiatric care — canvases that documented, without sentimentality, the daily life of patients, nurses, and doctors. When he left, he gave the series to the hospital. Even in breakdown, his instinct was to document.

He returned to work, continued painting, and in the late 1960s began engaging explicitly with the Civil Rights Movement. His 1967 series Builders used the image of construction workers — men and women building something together — as a sustained metaphor for community and collective effort. His involvement in the protest movements of the era was direct: he signed statements, supported student organizing, used his art as explicit advocacy. The integration of political commitment and artistic practice that had characterized the Harlem Renaissance was, for Lawrence, not a historical position. It was a living one.

In 1971, Lawrence joined the faculty of the University of Washington in Seattle, where he taught until 1983. He continued to paint throughout. His final major series, Builders, occupied him across three decades — returning repeatedly to the image of people constructing something together. For a man who had grown up in Harlem while it was being built, who had documented the migration of the people who built American cities, who had spent sixty years insisting that Black history was worth building into permanent art, the metaphor was not a choice. It was an autobiography.

Lawrence died in 2000 in Seattle, at the age of 82. By then, the Migration Series had been fully reunited and toured nationally; he had received the National Medal of Arts from President Clinton; the University of Washington had named a building after him. The institutional art world — which had taken decades to acquire the Toussaint and Tubman series — had settled into treating him as a major figure. The retrospective assessments were accurate: he was one of the most significant American painters of the 20th century.

What Lawrence proved, over six decades of work, was something that should not have needed proving: that Black history was serious enough to be the subject of serious art; that geometric abstraction and social content were not in conflict; that an artist could make politically committed work without sacrificing formal rigor; that the institutions that had not collected his early work were wrong, and the Black colleges and community organizations that had held it were right. He did not prove this by arguing. He proved it by painting.

The Migration Series hangs in MoMA and the Phillips Collection — two of the most important art institutions in America. Panel 22, about lynching, is in MoMA. Panel 49, about northern discrimination, is in the Phillips. The full account — the violence that drove the migration and the discrimination that awaited migrants when they arrived — is split between two museums in two cities, reunited only on special occasions. That, too, is part of the story.