Jacob Lawrence is among the best-known twentieth century African American painters, a distinction shared with Romare Bearden. Lawrence was only in his 20's when his "Migration Series" made him nationally famous. The series of paintings was featured in a 1941 issue of Fortune Magazine. The series depicted the epic Great Migration of blacks to the North.

Born in 1917 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, Lawrence was thirteen when he moved with his mother, sister and brother to New York City. His mother enrolled him in classes at an arts and crafts settlement house in Harlem, in an effort to keep him busy. The young Lawrence often drew patterns with crayons. Although much of his work copied his mother's carpets, an art teacher there noted great potential in Lawrence.

After dropping out of high school at sixteen, Lawrence worked in a laundry and a printing plant. More importantly, he attended classes at the Harlem Art Workshop, taught by his mentor, the African American artist Charles Alston. Lawrence married Gwendolyn Knight after receiving a job with the Works Progress Administration. In addition to getting paid, he was able to study and work with such notable Harlem Renaissance artists as Alston and Henry Bannarn in the Alston-Bannarn workshop.  read more

These prints are based on forty-one paintings from a series also entitled Toussaint L'Ouverture, which was completed in 1938 and is now in the Aaron Douglas Collection of the Amistad Research Center, New Orleans. The paintings were executed in tempera and measure 11 x 19 inches, significantly smaller in scale than the prints. Jacob Lawrence reworked many of the images during the process of translating them to silk screen. When an image has been significantly altered from the original, that fact is noted in the catalogue entry. The captions Lawrence provided for the paintings at the time of their execution accompany each of the following entries.

Toussaint L 'Ouverture was a leader in the Haitian revolution. Born a slave, he rose to become commander in chief of the revolutionary army. In 1800 he coordinated the effort to draw up Haiti's first democratic constitution. However, in 1802, before the Republic was firmly established, Toussaint was arrested by Napoleon Bonaparte's troops and sent to Paris, where he was imprisoned. He died in prison the following year. In 1804 Haiti became the first black Western republic.