Studio 360 Extra: American Icons: The Migration Series by Jacob Lawrence

Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen

PRX

Arts

4.6 • 675 Ratings

🗓️ 25 February 2020

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

From 1910 to 1970, 6.6 million African Americans migrated from the rural south – a dramatic movement that would permanently change the social, political and cultural fabric of our nation. In 1941, Jacob Lawerence’s iconic series The Migration of the Negro (now generally referred to as The Great Migration) rocked the art world with its depictions of an active moment very much underway. Over the course of 60 panels, the hardships of the South, the disappointments of the North, and the first steps of the Civil Rights movement are masterfully displayed.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	from PRX.
0:07.4	I'm Kurt Anderson, and this is the Studio 360 podcast.
0:16.1	Hello, I'm Terrence McKnight, the host of evenings with Terrence McKnight on WQXR in New York.
0:21.3	In this episode, as part of Studio 360s American Icon series, we're looking at the
0:26.8	migration series by the artist Jacob Lawrence.
0:32.4	It's a familiar story and a very American story.
0:37.2	A group of migrants flee poverty, violence, and repression to seek a better life.
0:43.3	Willing to start over, they make trade-offs between the culture they left behind and the new
0:48.3	world they have to embrace.
0:50.3	Panel number 25.
0:52.3	After a while, some communities were left almost bare.
0:58.0	Typically, this narrative is told from the perspective of European immigrants,
1:03.0	but it applies as well to the 6.6 million African Americans
1:08.0	who migrated from the south to the north between 1910 and 1970.
1:12.6	Panel number six, the trains were packed continually with migrants.
1:17.6	As Isabel Wilkerson described them in her book, The Warmth of Other Suns.
1:23.6	By their own actions, they did not dream the American dream.
1:28.3	They willed it into being by a definition of their own choosing.
1:33.3	They did not ask to be accepted, but declared themselves the Americans that perhaps few others recognized,
1:40.3	but that they had always been deep within their hearts.
1:48.6	The Great Migration changed American politics and culture.
1:52.8	The painter Jacob Lawrence was one of the few artists to chronicle it.
	...

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