CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/19/2017

Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series

Jacob Lawrence's 60-panel masterpiece, the Migration Series was completed in 1941, when he was just 23 years old. Panel 14, pictured here, is captioned: "Among the social conditions that existed which was partly the cause of the migration was the injustice done to the Negroes in the courts." As relevant today as it was more than half a century ago, this seminal document of racial injustice should be required reading for every American. Writing for the New York Times Book Review in 2015, Isabel Wilkerson marvels at Lawrence's ability to "so thoroughly inhabit something so large at so young an age and, through lived experience and focused devotion, become not only an artist but a documentarian, a sociologist and a historian, able to see past the midpoint of the movement into the present day. His final panel accurately predicted that the migration would continue. And his first panel, a depiction of migrants rushing toward trains destined for 'Chicago,' 'New York' and 'St. Louis,' seems prophetic in the age of Ferguson." In 2017, as we face a new composition on the Supreme Court, this image is more haunting than ever.