Why am I passionate about this?
I'm a lifelong reader and wanted to study literature from an early age. I grew up in Indianapolis, one of the cities reshaped by the Great Black Migration. I went to graduate school at the University of Chicago and found myself once again in the urban Midwest. My research for Conjuring the Folk led me to discover a trove of short stories by George Wylie Henderson, a Black writer from Alabama who migrated to Harlem. I edited the stories and published them as Harlem Calling: The Collected Stories of George Wylie Henderson. I'm a contributor to African American Review, the Journal of Modern Literature, and the Encyclopedia of the Great Black Migration.
David's book list on understanding the Great Black Migration
Why did David love this book?
Harlem painter Jacob Lawrence composed a series of sixty panels, applying tempera to composite board, to tell the story of the Great Black Migration; he numbered them sequentially and added captions to tie it all together. It opened to acclaim in 1941. You can see the entire work in the book Jacob Lawrence: The Migration Series. Read it and you will discover the conditions African Americans faced in the South, the networks that migrants used to make the journey northward, and the lives they formed in the cities. Lawrence’s images are bold and geometric, using expressionistic brushstrokes and a consistent color palette from panel to panel. I saw the series exhibited in Chicago and was impressed by the intimate scale of the panels—they measure only 18 by 12 inches.
1 author picked Jacob Lawrence as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
In 1941, Jacob Lawrence, then just twenty-three years old, completed a series of sixty small tempera paintings with text captions about the Great Migration. Within months of its making, Lawrence's Migration series was divided between The Museum of Modern Art (even numbered panels) and the Phillips Memorial Gallery (odd numbered panels). The work has since become a landmark in the history of African-American art, a monument in the collections of both institutions, and a crucial example of the way in which history painting was radically reimagined in the modern era. In 2015 and 2016, marking the centenary of the Great…
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