Between words and images: Jacob Lawrence’s linguistic and visual pictures of the Great Migration

Having a reputation as a painter of historical subjects, Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) is particularly recognized for his illustrations of the early twentieth-century African-American migration. His best known series of paintings, The Migration of the Negro (1941), challenges earlier interpretations of Black Americans’ journeys to the North and their everyday lives in the cities. The article explores Lawrence’s visual narratives together with the accompanying textual elements and the ways they present the social, political and cultural implications of the largest ever movement of African-American people across the country. It also considers the series from the perspective of form with a view to reconfiguring the relation between words and images.