Every 20 years or so, one of American art’s great modern masterworks is pulled out from storage and reassembled to be sent touring through the country to tell a new generation an old story. Simply called “The Migration Series,” it is painter Jacob Lawrence’s epochal, true and painfully accurate tale of human cruelty and hope.
In 1941, the 24-year-old Lawrence completed this carefully researched and planned series of 60 small paintings, and immediately he became the first black American artist to be accepted by the mainstream art establishment, hailed as a genius.
What Lawrence had created was a passionate artistic rendering of an epic American event, still going on as he painted it. From 1914 to 1970, 6 1/2 million southern-born African-Americans were first lured, then pushed from sharecropping tenant farms, sending them to the North’s biggest, most cosmopolitan cities. It was a collective act of a people finally breaking free of the economic and cultural serfdom that had replaced southern slavery after the Civil War a century before.
With a limited budget, Lawrence used water-based tempera to paint his vision on 18-by-12-inch masonite panels. The 60 separate migration paintings, small individually, are so carefully composed and arranged that, when presented as a whole, they become a single, monumental work.
Exhibiting the linear series in its entirety requires such a large space that it can’t be kept on permanent exhibition. Never before shown in Chicago, it opened Saturday at the Chicago Historical Society, Clark Street and North Avenue. Running through November 26, the Chicago showing is the last stop on the series’ current two-year, nine-city tour.
“When you think of modern art, you often think of masters like Picasso and Rousseau. Jake is strong enough to sit with them,” said Elizabeth Turner, curator at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., and the organizer of the tour.
Indeed, “The Migration Series” has escaped the era in which it was created. It never, for instance, would be mistaken for so-called WPA art, murals painted by Lawrence’s contemporaries to grace art deco buildings and public spaces financed by the Depression-era Works Progress Administration. Instead, it has a timeless quality of its own, like “Guernica,” a Picasso masterpiece of the same period.
Like many great works of art, “The Migration Series” grew out of trauma and struggle. In 1914, at the outbreak of World War I, tens of thousands of recent European immigrants in the United States returned to their homelands, feeling obligated to fight. So many left that factories in the northern industrial states were left dangerously undermanned just when wartime business began to boom. Frantic industrialists looked to the only big, readily available labor pool to replace lost workers. They began sending recruiters into the deep South to offer blacks free transportation and the promise of good-paying jobs.
Southern plantation owners, dependent on cheap black labor, resented northern competition. Since the end of the Civil War, white southern growers had managed to reduce blacks to a form of involuntary servitude nearly as stifling and inescapable as slavery itself. Growers tried to stem the tide of black migration to the North by having recruiters jailed and sometimes beaten.
Their efforts went for nothing. Hundreds of thousands of blacks responded by heading North. As the biggest industrial center in the nation, Chicago attracted a disproportionate share, bringing in 60,000 blacks by 1918. After the war, industrialists, trying to fight off the union movement, continued to import black labor to replace striking white workers.
For five decades, the northward stream of southern blacks more or less continued unabated. Every day mothers and fathers eagerly crammed themselves, their children and their battered belongings into buses, trains or cars and headed for the northern “promised land.”
Every day Chicago-bound buses filled with expectant faces stopped at Cairo after crossing into Illinois from Kentucky at the imaginary North-South borderline. There black passengers did something they never would have dreamed of doing in the South. They moved to seats at the front of the bus.
All during that era trains arriving daily from southern states pulled into the Illinois Central Railroad station at 12th Street and Michigan Avenue. Hundreds of blacks would spill off the train, children in tow. Some kissed the ground outside, thanking God for delivering them safely before hurrying off to a new home. Usually it was a South Side “kitchenette” apartment, two tiny rooms with a hot plate, an icebox and a shared bathroom down the hall.
Jobs were plentiful here then, even if you couldn’t read. Blacks knew that within days they’d be working in a factory or in a downtown service job, earning at least four times what they made back home harvesting cotton. They knew that their small children would no longer be forced to work and would study for nine months a year in well-equipped schools that would take them beyond the rudiments of reading and counting.
Most northern cities had the same sort of influx as Chicago. As a boy in New York’s Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, Jacob Lawrence, whose parents had come up from the South, watched the steady stream of new arrivals with fascination, listening to the stories of adults and storing them away for future use.
“Every other kid in my neighborhood either came up from the South, or their parents did,” says Lawrence, now 78 and an emeritus art professor at the University of Washington in Seattle. “You’d always hear people talking about another family just arriving and people helping them with food or clothing.”
As a teenage student at the American Artists School in New York, Lawrence hit upon the idea of eventually using the migration as the theme of a major art work. His chance came in 1940 and 1941, when he was awarded small stipends from the Julius Rosenwald Fund. He used them to do research for “The Migration Series,” then to rent studio space large enough so he could lay out all 60 panels and paint all of them at once.
Before he started, Lawrence says, he knew what he wanted to paint on each panel. The panels became almost cinematic, telling a powerful, emotional story without sentimentality. They show the cruelties that made people so determined to leave the South for an uncertain future, and the cruelties and triumphs they found in the North. To pull the 60 paintings into a unified whole, he mixed his own colors, applying each color to all the panels in succession, starting with black and moving to successively lighter gradations.
“I always considered it one work, rather than 60 separate pieces,” Lawrence says. “I did the entire series at once so that the panels would hold together, so the forms, shapes, textures all remained uniform and there wouldn’t be differences from the first panel to the 60th one. Each painting is a successful work, I like to think, but the impact of each is dependent on the 60 panels as a whole.”
The critics certainly agreed when the series was first presented, under Lawrence’s original title “The Migration of the Negro,” at the Downtown Gallery in New York in November 1941. A curious but influential audience representing a political spectrum from Communists to conservative captains of industry gathered around the 24-year-old artist and lionized him for his accomplishment.
Radical leftist artists, especially active and influential in those days, saw a message in Lawrence’s work that was useful to them and spread his praises. But so did the capitalist Fortune Magazine, which used 26 of the “Migration” panels in an impressive layout in its November 1941 issue.
Long-ignored, African-American art suddenly became something important to which people of all political stripes wanted their names attached. A wider exhibition of Lawrence and other black artists, “American Negro Art,” was launched a month later, and liberals and conservatives alike lined up to sponsor it, from Eleanor Roosevelt and New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to Edsel Ford and John D. Rockefeller Jr.
A proud but modest man, Lawrence took his bows and continued on with his art. Eventually, “The Migration Series” was preserved intact, as New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Phillips Collection each purchased 30 of the panels. The two institutions have cooperated in putting them together for the periodic national tours.
The great migration itself continued for 30 years after Lawrence’s rendering of it. After World War II, mechanized cotton pickers appeared on southern plantations, changing the southern economy and way of life overnight. White southern society, once terrified of losing cheap black labor, now actively pushed to get as many black families as possible to move North. They simply were no longer needed in the South.
In Chicago the black population from 1950 to 1970 rose from 492,000 to a million, just when boom times were beginning to ebb and industrial jobs began to disappear. Chicago’s South Side became the unofficial black capital of America, the largest contiguous concentration of African-Americans in the nation. Black culture thrived in the city, producing world-famous musicians, writers and artists. It also educated and launched hundreds of thousands of children of migrants into useful lives in the economic mainstream.
But Chicago and other northern cities proved to be no paradise. Racial prejudice in the North, though not so open as in the South, was very much alive in all its pernicious forms. That prejudice simply exacerbated tensions as the black influx eventually overwhelmed the northern cities. Much of the urban unrest, which has so unsettled America since World War II, has its roots in the migration as blacks have pushed for better housing, education, police protection and jobs.
Though Lawrence finished “The Migration Series” in 1941, the seeds of what was to follow are all contained in the work, testifying to the artist’s prescient vision. On the balance, however, Lawrence says he believes the migration was great for America.
“With every movement and advance there is a great deal of struggle that we have to pay for,” Lawrence says. “We have to be willing to pay for it. Black people experienced a sort of freedom they had never had when they went North, just like the Europeans who came here.
“It was a very positive experience for ethnics and the country as a whole, bringing in all that latent talent, with the grandchildren and great grandchildren eventually contributing to the economy and the culture of the country.”
One of the earliest migrant children, Lawrence himself is one of the migration’s great success stories.
“He is simply top of the line,” says Charles Stuckey, curator of 20th Century painting and sculpture at the Art Institute of Chicago, “one of the major 20th Century artists.”
