One-Way Ticket: Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series and Other Works
Museum of Modern Art
(New York City)
Through September 7,
2015
The theory of relativity works for history as well as
physics; that is, the nature of reality depends upon the position of the
observer. For white Americans, World War One conjures stories of the Argonne
Forest, Belleau Wood, and the Marne; World War II inspires narratives of Monte
Cassino, Normandy, Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima. Not so for African Americans—the
U.S. military was segregated until 1948. Although nearly a half million black
men served during the two world wars, those numbers are small potatoes when compared
to the real mobilization during wartime: the Great Migration––the movement of
6.6 million African Americans from the South to the North. Among those observing
the Great Migration was black artist Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), whose 1941 Migration Series remains one of the most
vivid depictions of America's greatest voluntary internal population shift. (By
way of contrast, just 500,000 Americans took part in Westward-bound wagon train
sojourns between 1843-69.) 
A new show at New York's Museum of Modern Art reunites for
the first time in decades all 60 of the panels Lawrence painted to document the
Great Migration. It is at once an audacious and poignant show—audacious because
Lawrence was just 21 when he undertook the project, and poignant because he pulled
no punches about why African Americans left the South, the promise of the
North, or the disappointments that accompanied the occasional joys. The why was
simple: Jim Crow, lynching, exploitation of black labor, and everyday
indignities. Lawrence had a gift for vivid understatement. For instance, he
represented the poverty of Southern blacks with a sparse scene of a man and
woman staring down at their bare table and an empty fry pan hanging from the
wall. To show the backbreaking labor to which children were subjected, he
borrowed from ancient Egyptian art to show uneducated youngsters as so many hod
carriers for an unseen white pharaoh.
When war created employment opportunities, black men and
women flocked to rail lines headed north. In one panel, Lawrence drives home the
theme of flight by juxtaposing a mass of black bodies headed in the same
direction as an overhead pride of crows. Northern cities dazzled and
intimidated, as one can see in a blocky riot of colorful tenements worthy of
Mondrian.
But even at 21, Lawrence knew the downside; he chronicled race riots
in Chicago and East St Louis to remind viewers that racism was alive and well
north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Nor did he shy away from calling out black
snobbery, such as fashionable veterans of the Harlem Renaissance (1918-36) who
saw newly arrived southerners more as flotsam than as kindred spirits.
In the end, though, think of the contrast between then
Egyptian-like hod carriers and Lawrence's touching portrayal of three girls
doing math on a school blackboard. Call it the end of ignorance, which is so
often the beginning of defiance. It is instructive to consider that Lawrence's Migration Series came the same year A.
Philip Randolph threatened to mobilize a black march on Washington, D.C. and
forced President Roosevelt to ban discrimination in the defense industry. Many
historians (including me) see that as a key moment in launching the modern civil
rights movement.
For his part, Jacob Lawrence went on to become one of the 20th
century's most important black artists, and one who produced other works
depicting black history. He is sometimes identified as a Harlem Renaissance
painter, though its energy was nearly spent by the time Lawrence's family moved
from Atlantic City to Harlem in 1930. But to remind us of other ways in which
politics and culture intersect, the MOMA exhibit also includes poetry from
Langston Hughes, book jackets from Richard Wright books, Depression Era
photographs, and a terrific corridor where one can rest whilst listening to selections
from now-iconic black musicians such as Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith, Lead Belly,
and Paul Robeson. Want to know what the Great Migration brought? Watch the 1959
video of Billie Holliday singing "Strange Fruit," and you'll figure
it out really fast.
Do not miss this exhibit if you're anywhere near the Big
Apple between now and September. Observe Jacob Lawrence's world. –Rob Weir
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