The painter’s groundbreaking works trace the journey of African Americans out of the Jim Crow South.
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.) This article was taken from The Atlantic’s Citylab