Antique

A series of 60 paintings by Jacob Lawrence captures the journeys of millions of African-Americans who left the Jim Crow South in search of better lives elsewhere.

There's no historical marker outside Jacob Lawrence's childhood home in New York City's Harlem neighborhood.
But Khalil Gibran Muhammad, director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, has an idea of what it might say: "Here lived one of the 20th century's most influential visual artists, a man named Jacob Lawrence, who was a child of southern migrants."
The son of a cook from South Carolina and a domestic worker from Virginia, Lawrence was born in Atlantic City in 1917, but it was his years in Harlem that shaped some of his most iconic work: a series of 60 paintings about the black Southerners, like his parents, who fled to cities in the North and West during the Great Migration.

That mass exodus of African-Americans began a hundred years ago, and lasted until the 1970s. New York's Museum of Modern Art is honoring that history by displaying Lawrence's entire series for the first time since 2008, when it was shown at The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. Co-owned by the two museums, the paintings are making a rare appearance together now at MoMA in "One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series and Other Visions of the Great Movement North."



Each of the 60 paintings in Jacob Lawrence's Great Migration series is accompanied with a caption. For this panel, he wrote in 1941: "In every town Negroes were leaving by the hundreds to go North and enter into Northern industry."

Leaving A 'Godforsaken Place'

Jim Crow laws that codified racial inequality in the South helped drive Lawrence's parents – and 6 million other African-Americans — to move to cities like New York, Detroit, and Chicago. Along the way, they transformed the music, demographics, and politics of the places they went.
"They were not only heroic in their courage to leave a godforsaken place for a better place," Muhammad explains, "but also that they were also going to challenge that new place to live up to its own possibilities."

Isabel Wilkerson, who wrote about the Great Migration in The Warmth of Other Suns, says the mass movement was a turning point in U.S. history that was overlooked for decades.
"There are many, many children and grandchildren of the Great Migration who did not hear this directly from their own families," she says. "Because it went on for so long, it was often hard to see, and I think one of the people who could see it all along was Jacob Lawrence."



"Another cause was lynching. It was found that where there had been a lynching, the people who were reluctant to leave at first left immediately after this."