Jacob Lawrence was born in 1917 and died in 2000, at the age of 82.  He was born in Atlantic City but was brought up in a settlement house in Harlem. This was the period of the Harlem Renaissance, a time of sharply focused social awareness and a burgeoning black consciousness, which nurtured the young Lawrence and opened his eyes to the life around him. He began taking art lessons early, and during the Depression, he worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA), an organization that aided the development of hundreds of African American artists in the early 1900's. It was his own background in Harlem and the hard life of black Americans that influenced Lawrence's earliest work. His Migration Series, supported by grants from the Rosenwald Foundation, was an immediate success and brought the twenty-four year-old to national attention. Lawrence continued to work in series -possibly reflecting the oral tradition of the black community- and the individual images, while powerful on their own, have connective strength when viewed as a narrative.  One of Lawrence's most prolific series, the Toussaint L'Ouveture series, inspired by the Haitian Revolution of 1795 and completed in 1938 while Lawrence was only 21years old, brought him national acclaim and continues to tour national museums today.