BMA 1976.39.8

At the polls, all voters are equal. The vote of the poor person counts just as much as the vote of the rich. The unknown and the famous have equal power. Women and men, citizens of all colors, all back-grounds, all religions, have a vote to use as they wish.

In The 1920s...The Migrants Arrive and Cast Their Ballots, we are witness to a quiet scene in which a group of black people, new arrivals in a northern city, cast their votes, perhaps for the first time. At the table in the center, a man in a black suit gives his name and address to poll workers who have the names of eligible voters listed in their book. Other voters, young and old, in fine clothes and overalls, await their turns. A man with a gold cane chats with a woman in blue. Another man reads the newspaper. At the rear, a man steps into the voting booth. Nobody knows which levers this man will pull after he closes the curtain.

Jacob Lawrence made this print in 1974 when he was fifty-seven years old. He had been asked to contribute to a portfolio of silkscreen prints in honor of the nation's 200th birthday in 1976. Lawrence was well aware that for many years in the nation's history black citizens had been unlawfully denied the right to vote. He thought that a scene of black people peacefully exercising that right was a useful way to mark the country's Bicentennial.

Jacob Lawrence is an artist who finds inspiration for his painting in the struggles and incidents of everyday life in the African-American community. He grew up in Harlem, received instruction in art from black artists in Harlem's art centers, and was encouraged by Harlem's best thinkers to feel pride in his African-American heritage and to use it as subject matter for his paintings.

"If I have achieved a degree of success as a creative artist," he said, "it is mainly due to the black experience which is our heritage - an experience which gives inspiration, motivation and stimulation. I was inspired by the black aesthetic by which we are surrounded, motivated to manipulate form, color, space, line and texture to depict our life, and stimulated by the beauty and poignancy of our environment. We do not forget...that encouragement which came from the black community...."

The idea for a picture about voting came to Lawrence thirty-four years earlier in 1940 when he produced a 60-panel series called The Migration of the Negro. This series chronicled the mass migration of more than a million black people from the rural South to the cities of the North between 1910-1940. The Migration was an appropriate subject for Lawrence, whose own parents and many friends had migrated from the South.

[As a young boy] "I didn't know the term 'migration,' but I remember people used to tell us when a new family would arrive. The people in the neighborhood would collect clothes for these newcomers and pick out coals that hadn't completely burned in the furnace to get them started...."

Lawrence spent long days reading about the Migration in the Schomburg Collection of the New York City Public Library. "I did plenty of research in books and pamphlets written during the migration and afterward...I took notes. Sometimes I would make ten or twenty sketches for one incident."

The Migration Series of 1940 depicts the poor conditions in the South, the floods, the boll weevil that attacked the crops, the unfair treatment of tenant farmers, the lynchings. It shows how northern labor recruiters came south promising jobs and free railroad passage to southern blacks who were willing to leave their homes. It shows railroad stations crammed with people starting their journey northward and the fate, both good and bad, that awaited them in northern cities: overcrowded tenements, race riots, churches where they found sustenance, and schools where their children could learn. One of these panels bears the caption, "In the North, the Negroes had freedom to vote." It is a clear precursor to Lawrence's 1974 print, presenting a line of voters, registration table, and voting booth.

In 1941, Fortune magazine published twenty-six of Lawrence's Migration Series paintings accompanied by an eloquent commentary by Alain Locke. The portion which refers to the subject of voting follows:

"Though the hardships of the cotton South were behind them, the migrants who went north found no Promised Land.... [Still], the northern Negro at least can vote, send his children to school and move about with some freedom. Consequently, he is much more of a man than his southern brother. But while he is boxed up in a semighetto, and while the white world conspires to prevent him from earning a living, he is in no sense a democratic man living in a democracy.... But...the Negro is finding strength.... If he cannot make any individual headway in a white world, he can make collective headway if he learns to make the weight of his numbers felt - and he is learning. He has the ballot - millions of ballots - and in recent years he has swung more than a few cities and perhaps a few states...."