The Great Migration

The Great Migration: An American Story  

Paintings By Jacob Lawrence       Harper Trophy Books     1995

This book collects the entire series of 60 paintings that constitutes Jacob Lawrence’s stunningly iconic Great Migration series.

Jacob Lawrence created this exhibit as a young man. He was 22 when he started painting the series in 1940, and he completed the 60 paintings over the course of a year. As part of the exhibit, Jacob Lawrence wrote a narrative that describes, links, and unifies the paintings in order to explain the subject.

Utterly fantastic! This book is perfect for introducing the great migration. The art and the narrative combine to provide a surprising amount and depth of information for such a sparse format.

This book pairs extraordinarily well with some of the other outstanding  picture books that treat the Great Migration. “God Bless the Child” and “I, Too, Am, America” immediately come to mind.

Additionally, this book is a fantastic example of sequential art, and how it can be used to tell a story, frame a narrative, and depict events. I think this book would be invaluable in this respect as well.

You can look at the book as a guide on how to format student art that accompanies student generated stories, personal narratives, instructional text assignments, etc.

Also, I think that an interesting exercise would be to use this book in a comparative study with graphic novels. One could compare & contrast, find similarities & differences, and figure out the defining features of the format and how it works to tell a story.