Between 1910 and 1970, more than six million African Americans moved from the rural South to the cities of the North, West and Midwest, chief among them Chicago, New York and St. Louis. This mass exodus, known as the Great Migration, dramatically altered the nation’s profile. In 1941, the American painter Jacob Lawrence charted this demographic shift in his Migration Series, comprising 60 small tempera paintings. Titled In the North the Negro had better educational facilities, panel 58 depicts three girls in bright dresses writing numbers on a large chalkboard. This picture of children learning in the North contrasts sharply with Lawrence’s depiction of childhood labour in the South. In panel 24, for instance, he shows four bare-chested children working in cotton fields under the sun.

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