WASHINGTON D.C.—At the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, unveiled here this week, the “mountain” and “stone” have become the metaphors for black history. Elsewhere in the capital city, other artistic metaphors—such as the “railroad” and the “schoolgirl”—also have been telling the African American story.
At Union Station, the city hub for Amtrak, the emblem of black history is the train. The station is displaying a portable photo exhibition on “The Great Migration” of blacks to the North between 1910 and 1930. The exhibit occupies the Gate D foyer, and Amtrak plans to show the display at other stations through the autumn and winter.
The railroad carried hundreds of thousands of southern migrants to the Northeast and Midwest. For example, blacks from Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas mainly headed for Chicago “because the railroads had direct lines to the Windy City,” states the exhibit, a mix of text and historic photos. This migration explains the origin of jazz and the blues in Chicago and Detroit.
The migration also helped fuel the “New Black Movement,” soon to be called the Harlem Renaissance in New York. Its leaders believed the migration would change American cities and black identity. Writing in 1917, the black intellectual W. E. B. Dubois said that the war in Europe, having curtailed Atlantic migration, would “mean increased demand for colored laborers in the North,” leading to a “social change of great moment,” according to the Amtrak exhibit.
In 1917 also, Jacob Lawrence, the future artist, was born in New York City to parents who had migrated from South Carolina. He would be inspired by the Harlem Renaissance and by the tempera paintings of the Italian Renaissance. While attending public schools, Lawrence also ventured to the Harlem Art Workshop and to lectures on black culture and art at the 135th Street Public Library.
Soon he was painting series about the lives of black pioneers such Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. It was his 1940-41 series on “The Migration of the Negro” that made its mark on art history, however. He planned the series of 60 small-panel paintings as a whole, numbering each one and giving each episode a caption. Across the panels he used the same sold colors and built his compositions around angular forms and contrasts of dark and light.
The series struck a chord in popular culture. In 1941, Fortune magazine published 26 of the panels. Eventually the series was pursued by large collections and museums. Today, the 60 panels are divided between the Phillips Collection here and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The Phillips owns the odd-number panels (MOMA the even). At the Phillips, they are on permanent display—just across town from Amtrak and the King Memorial.
The Phillips panels and Amtrak’s display at Gate D tell parallel stories. Panel 1 is perhaps the best known. Lawrence shows a crowded train station with the gates named “Chicago,” “New York,” and “St. Louis.” Panel 23 says, “The Migration Spread.” The Amtrak exhibit offers data on increased rail traffic and the dollar amounts. Panel 39 illustrates that, “Railroad platforms were piled high with luggage.” The Amtrak exhibit photos show the piles. Lawrence painted how the men went first and sent money home to bring wives and children. Amtrak gives some of that data.
What only Lawrence could convey, however, was the social reality in the North. As another panel shows, the North offered opportunities, but also discrimination of “a different kind.” Lawrence eventually moved to Seattle, where he died in 2000. To suit the times, he renamed the series “The Great Migration” and adjusted his original captions. He wrote in 1992 that the series showed “what human beings can endure and survive.”
As a painter, Lawrence had a naïve and charming style. Given the 1940s rage for Abstract painting, he went against the grain by using narrative illustration. For the history of African Americans, narrative seems to be the artistic mode.
The Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial is narrative. The sculptor, who is Chinese, based the design on King’s 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, when he said, “Out of a mountain of despair, a stone of hope.” The two-part sculpture, carved from granite, is a mountain entrance and, across a plaza, a thirty-foot-tall King emerging from a stone.
Last month, narrative art on black history was given the premier spot in the hallway outside the Oval Office at the White House. President Obama chose Normal Rockwell’s 1964 oil painting, “The Problem We All Live With,” to hang there for a given period. The painting shows U.S. marshals escorting six-year-old, pig-tailed Ruby Bridges into a New Orleans elementary school in 1960.
Bridges asked the White House to choose the painting, since the 1960 event had “a lot to do with this particular president,” Bridges told Politico. The Sunday dedication of the King Memorial was cancelled because of the approaching hurricane. Even so, the artistic metaphors of mountains, stones, railroads, and schoolgirls have all contributed to this moment of reflection on black history.
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