Michael De Souza

Professor Miller

African American Studies 202

15 May 2016

Economic Determinism and Ambition in the Migration Series by Jacob Lawrence

The Migration series by Jacob Lawrence is a sequence of sixty paintings (with

captions) portraying the mass movement of African Americans from the rural South to

Migration. I argue that Lawrence shows several economic factors, such as difficult

farming conditions in the South and greater job opportunities in the North, as providing

the basis for the mass movement, but I also think that he shows hope and ambition as

playing an important role.

First it might be helpful to discuss what historians say about the causes of the

Great Migration. Often they describe economic factors labeled “push” and “pull,” as

explained in an encyclopedia article: “The pull of labor shortages in northern industry

and the lack of white male labor combined with the push of the devastation of the

cotton crops so many blacks labored on by flood and boll weevils to create conditions

for migration” (Adams 504). This is to say that migrants were pushed out of the South

and also pulled to the North and West by economic factors. The article goes on to

explain these factors more specifically. Migrants were influenced to migrate by labor

agents, who were paid to visit southern towns to recruit workers for northern industry;

by The Chicago Defender, a newspaper that was widely circulated throughout the South

rested upon the assumption that blacks were by nature docile, dependent, and

unambitious” (38). But then he questions this view, saying that “the Great Migration

represented a refusal by one-half million black southerners to cooperate” with southern

leaders (38-39). While it seems clear that economic factors played an important role in

the migration, we can see that African Americans refused to sit still and instead acted on

their ambitions for a better life.

As I mentioned, Lawrence was the child of migrants and grew up in Harlem. He

had never visited the South when he completed the Migration series in 1941, but he was

surrounded by migrants and heard their stories throughout his childhood (Turner,

Introduction). Lawrence’s mother raised him and his brother and sister alone (she

separated from Lawrence’s father when he was only seven years old [Phillips 161]). Like

many in Harlem during the Depression years, the family was poor. Despite poverty,

Lawrence found strength from the community of African Americans. Lawrence spoke

of the Harlem community, rather than a specific individual, as the inspiration for his

was his role model, Lawrence emphasizes that group ambition on behalf of its members

is inspirational. This message is central to the Migration series.

We should not forget that the Migration series made a big impact when it was

first exhibited in 1941. It was part of the first major exhibit of African American art in a

downtown New York gallery (Phillips 162). Part of his series was published in Fortune

magazine, and Lawrence sold the series in halves to two major museums before it went

on a national tour (163). Why was it so popular? One art historian writes, “The series

appealed broadly to critics and viewers alike because it embodied American ideals

about individual good fortune” (Patton 156). That is, individual panels showed hopeful

actions by different African Americans. But it is interesting to notice that the series is

different from previous ones he painted, like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman,

which focused on a hero or heroine. Patricia Hills points this out, and she states that

“the people as a whole—acting with a collective will—take on a heroic dimension

beyond distinctions of class or gender” in the Migration series (146). There is possibly a

shows a crowd of African Americans in a train station; gates list destinations as

Chicago, New York, and Saint Louis. The next panel portrays a white man operating

machinery, and the caption explains that there was a labor shortage in the North. The

third panel shows a group of African Americans carrying luggage and walking together.

The fourth panel shows a black man pounding a spike with a hammer, and its caption

says that African Americans were the remaining source of labor “after all others had

been exhausted.” So we can see a pattern: African American group, white individual,

African American group, black individual (Hills also talks about this pattern [148]).

Although the pattern does not stay exactly this way throughout the series, the back-

and-forth between depictions of individuals and groups is pretty common. My point is

similar to this one in a scholarly article: “The narrative . . . is not linear, but alternates

between the insistent portrayal of the dominant event in the plot—the actual physical

displacement of the people—and paintings dealing with the main causes of this mass

migration” (Tribe 405). This quotation brings us back to the issue of causes, which I

trains. So we can see how the opposition individual/society shapes the way he tells his

story.

There is evidence that the relationship between individual and society is

important to the development of Lawrence’s style. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., an important

scholar of African American culture, emphasizes the role of the individual in two

artistic movements:

Lawrence’s Migration series is an attempt to resolve the two central competing

modes of representation in the African American tradition that clashed and

struggled for dominance in the 1920s and 1930s: a naturalism that sought to

reveal how individual “choice” was always shaped and curtailed by

environmental forces and a modernism that sought to chart the relation of the

individual will to the chaotic environment. (17)

It is interesting to think about what Gates says and compare it to the idea of the “push”

and “pull” causes for the migration. These causes can be seen as “environmental forces”

individual and society I talked about in the previous paragraph.

I do not want to neglect the importance of Lawrence’s choice of materials and

artistic process on his art. I mentioned that Lawrence was poor, so his choice of

materials was limited mostly by what he could afford. When he was a young art

student, Lawrence said, he chose poster paint and cheap brown paper for his art

supplies. He later spoke of the choice: “It was tough, strong, durable . . . and, eh, a jar of

color—red, yellow, blue, the primary colors—were, like, fifteen cents a jar at the five-

and-dime, so I was dealing with very inexpensive material. And it suited me—it

benefited me” (Jacob Lawrence). Lawrence continued to use these cheap supplies even

after he became famous and probably could afford better ones. We might see the use of

cheap materials as a kind of economic determinism, forcing him to create with very

limited means.

For the Migration series, Lawrence first did library research so he could

understand his subject. He wrote the captions (which make up part of the story), and

process as creating a unity among the individual panels. Jutta Lorensen, for example,

refers to his palette as the “migration colors,” and she explains its effect: “Lawrence’s

color code is a repetitive mode that accompanies the viewer/reader from the first panel

to the last, as the same shades of green, red, yellow, blue, brown, and an incisive use of

black are present throughout the entire series” (576). She shows how this works in her

interpretation of panel 6, which shows a train car filled with sleeping migrants: “each

bench unites two voyagers through the migration colors, thus reinforcing the

resounding note of the communal, a prevalent theme in the Migration Series. The

composition of this ‘packed train’ with its appeal to collectivity nevertheless emphasizes

what is single and singular: a woman in a yellow dress nursing a child” (577). Lawrence

was forced by economic circumstances to use cheap materials and just a few colors. We

can see a parallel with the plight of African Americans, who were forced by poverty and

social conditions to a limited range of jobs. Lawrence seems to be saying that even when

faced with economic determinism, African Americans can find a way to express

Fig. 1. A panel in the series showing a group of migrants walking together (Turner, Jacob

I already discussed some panels that show causes of migration (usually

individuals), and I mentioned that the panels that depict migration usually show

groups. I want to say something more about how hope or ambition is represented in

some parts of the series. One of the best-known images in the series (see fig. 1) shows a

group of migrants with their luggage walking in profile from right to left; birds in the

sky are also shown in profile moving in the same direction, as if all were moving north

at the start of a hopeful spring. The viewer can see that some of the individuals in the

everyone in the group is strong and determined to “go North,” as the caption says. He

features children in other panels, like number 32, where a child in white and red clothes

sits on luggage facing the viewer and a crowd of black travelers waiting on benches

(Lawrence prepared a similar image as an illustration in a book of poems by Langston

Hughes [Lawrence, One-Way Ticket 63]). Then there is an image like panel 46, which

shows a staircase ascending from the viewer to an open doorway revealing sky and the

moon. The caption talks about unhygienic housing in the labor camps, but the image