The Great Migration
Many aspects of the migrants’ experience are represented throughout the 60 panels that comprises The Migration Series. Jacob Lawrence evokes a sense of the migrants’ hope on their journey north and the realities of their new life in northern cities.
While the last panel leaves the audience feeling hopeful with the caption, “And the migrants kept coming,” the previous 59 panels express a range of stories filled with challenges and hope that include finding new jobs, homes and communities, living in crowded urban environments, and facing a new form of discrimination.
How did Lawrence express the migrant experience through the artistic choices he made? What sort of color, shape, composition, and line choices did he make to convey a specific story or mood?
In the classroom applications, students have many opportunities to explore and empathize with the migrant experience through writing, drawing, and theater.
Jack Delano
Group of Florida migrants on their way home to Cranberry, New Jersey, to pick potatoes, near Sharboro, North Carolina.
Farm Security Administration, Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
Photograph, July 1941
View DetailRand McNally Railroad Map of Principal Transportation Lines in the United States
Division of Maps and Geography, Library of Congress.
1921
View DetailJacob Lawrence
The Migration Series, Panel No. 21
Acquired 1942; The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC.
Casein tempera on hardboard, 1941
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