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First Publication of the Migration Series Captures A Defining Moment in. American History
Jacob Lawrence's parents were among the 400,000 African Americans who migrated from the rural South to the urban North in search of work and a better life between 1900 and 1930. In 1940, the young artist expressed the struggles and hopes of the movement in a series of paintings that will be reproduced in its entirety for the first time, accompanied by interpretive essays by a roster of distinguished scholars and historians, in "Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series."
"As for representing the process of migration, there is no literary equivalent to Lawrence's visual narrative," said Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Professor of the Humanities and Chairman of the Afro-American Studies Department at Harvard University and author of an introductory essay that defines both the migration and the artist's endeavor.
Heralded as a pre-eminent interpreter of the African American experiences, Lawrence created "The Migration Series" to express his personal understanding of the great migration. His paintings and text convey the stark and poignant experiences of injustice, strife, struggle, change, hope, and ambition, and even the beauty of this significant event in American history. For example, the panel featured on the book's cover portrays black people moving and taking charge of their lives instead of shrinking before social terrorism and inferior living conditions. And in panel 59, the social and political conditions of the migration are portrayed in a scene in which African Americans on line to vote captioned, "In the North the Negro had freedom...