Black Lives Matter in Jacob Lawrence's 'Migration Series' at MoMA

Jacob Lawrence was a painter, but he was also a storyteller of the first order. In his 1941 masterwork, “Migration Series,” Lawrence (1917-2000) unspools one of the foundational narratives of the modern United States: the journey undertaken by some 6 million African Americans over the first half of the 20th century, which took them out of the Jim Crow South in search of better lives in the cities of the North. It is now on view in its 60-piece entirety at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the centerpiece of an illuminating show called “One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series.” (If you can’t get there, the show’s excellent website reproduces the series in its entirety.)

The movement of humanity that came to be known as the Great Migration was a seismic population shift that profoundly shaped American cities and American culture, even as it transformed the lives of the individuals who made the trip. Lawrence himself was a part of the story he tells, born in 1917 to parents who traveled north. His mother, who did domestic work, came from Virginia. His father, a cook on the railroad, was from South Carolina. Lawrence was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey, but the family soon moved to Easton, Pennsylvania and then Philadelphia, before ending up in Harlem in 1930.