Telling the Story of the Great Migration, in Pictures
From around World War I through the 1960s, there was a giant demographic shift in this country which was as massive and consequential as the pioneers who rode wagon trains into the frontier a century earlier. Millions of black Americans in the rural South moved to the cities of the North in search of better living conditions and jobs. African Americans escaped Jim Crow racism in the South, only to find racist cops, segregated housing, and unequal schools in the North. We’re still dealing with the fallout today.
“This is a history that we collectively need to know.” — Leah Dickerman
The Great Migration was massive, but at the time, it went largely unreported outside of black America. Growing up in Atlantic City and Harlem in the 1920s and '30s, the artist Jacob Lawrence witnessed it first-hand. He was just 23 when he made 60 paintings with captions that told the story of the movement. The “Migration Series” was immediately recognized as a masterpiece of modern art, according to Leah Dickerman, curator of an exhibit of the series at the Museum of Modern Art.
Lawrence didn’t flinch from the ugly parts of this story. Seventy years later, America is still struggling with a lot of the problems he depicted, like police violence and the mass incarceration of black Americans. “We act as if it’s all new,” Dickerman says. “This is a history that we collectively need to know. There is a long history to Lawrence’s concerns.”
