The 1920's...The Migrants Arrive and Cast Their Ballots,

1974, printed 1975

Lawrence depicts a scene related to the Great Migration of the 1910s and 1920s, during which 1.6 million Black Americans fled the racial violence and oppression of the Jim Crow South to seek better prospects in the North. Here, he shows recent arrivals exercising their right to vote, a right denied many in the South through voter suppression. Lawrence’s parents had come separately from Virginia and South Carolina and met in the North, so he was himself a product of the Great Migration, which he called “an epic” and “one of the great points of this drama which we as Americans have experienced.” Lawrence had earlier treated the subject in depth in his famed series The Migration of the Negro (1940–41).