One More

Sterling Brown and Langston Hughes, album artwork by Jacob Lawrence (1967)

Jacob Lawrence was born September 7, 1917, in Atlantic City, New Jersey, where his parents had migrated from the rural south. After dropping out of school at 16, Lawrence worked in a laundromat and a printing plant. He continued with art, attending classes at the Harlem Art Workshop, taught by the noted African-American artist Charles Alston. Alston urged him to attend the Harlem Community Art Center, led by the sculptor Augusta Savage, who helped him to secure a job with the Works Progress Administration during the Great Depression. Lawrence was one of the first artists trained in and by the African-American community in Harlem. Throughout his lengthy artistic career, Lawrence concentrated on exploring the history and struggles of African Americans.

His early paintings were biographical accounts of key figures of the African diaspora. He was just 21 years old when his series of 41 paintings of the Haitian general Toussaint L’Ouverture was shown in an exhibit of African-American artists at the Baltimore Museum of Art. This was followed by a series of paintings of the lives of Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass.

Lawrence completed the 60-panel set of narrative paintings entitled Migration of The Migration Series, in 1940–41, which depicted the Great Migration of hundreds of thousands of African Americans moved from the rural South to the urban North, fleeing the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan. The exhibition of The Migration Series made him the first African American artist represented by a New York gallery and brought him national recognition.

In 1999, he and his wife established the Jacob and Gwendolyn Lawrence Foundation for the creation, presentation and study of American art, with a particular emphasis on work by African-American artists. Lawrence continued to paint until a few weeks before his death from lung cancer on June 9, 2000, at the age of 82