In 1940 the American artist Jacob Lawrence chronicled this journey of hope in a flowing narrative sequence of paintings. They are divided between the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York and The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. After more than 20 years, The Phillips Collection mounted the first exhibition of all 60 paintings, touring museums around the country.

"This stirring picture book brings together the sixty panels of Lawrence's epic narrative Migration series, which he created in 1940-1941. They tell of the journey of African-Americans who left their homes in the South around World War I and traveled in search of better lives in the northern industrial cities. Lawrence is a storyteller with words as well as pictures: his captions and introduction to this book are the best commentary on his work. A poem at the end by Walter Dean Myers also reveals [as do the paintings] the universal in the particulars." -BL.