Jacob Lawrence's American Struggle

In the mid-1950s, as Brown v. Board of Education felled the ideology of "separate but equal," the great African-American artist Jacob Lawrence saw the need for a version of American history that reckoned with its complexities and contradictions yet was shared by all its citizens. The result was his monumental work Struggle . . . from the History of the American People.

For two years, Lawrence developed the series of thirty panels, each measuring 12 16 inches. He created the panels as history you could hold in your hands and intended to reproduce the images in a book that he never realized. The paintings depict signal moments in the American Revolution and the early decades of the American republic, and feature the words and actions of founding fathers, enslaved people, women, and Native Americans. In January 2020, the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, is mounting the landmark exhibition, Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle. The show, which unites the panels in one place for the first time in nearly half a century, then travels to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama, the Seattle Art Museum, and the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., on a two-year national tour.

In the spirit of Lawrence's project, Six Foot Press is partnering with PEM to publish a collection of brief interpretive texts written by teens in response to the Struggle series. This book is a chorus of thirty singular young adult voices responding to each of these seminal works. Published to coincide with the January 2020 opening at PEM, this illustrated Young Adult book features teen writers expressing how Lawrence and his Struggle series speaks to them on a personal, emotional level. The writers come from a broad variety of races and ethnicities, nationalities, religions, genders, sexualities, and abilities, and underrepresented voices. As Jacob Lawrence mined American history to reflect upon events he saw happening around him in segregation-era America, these young adult authors use these panels to comment on their experiences in today's America.