Created between 1954 and 1956, Struggle is among Lawrence’s least-known works. Last year, twenty-six of its thirty panels (four are unlocated and possibly lost) were reunited and exhibited for the first time since 1958. Executed in vivid egg tempera, they explore the early history of the United States, from the American Revolution through the end of the War of 1812.

As the struggle for equal rights accelerated in the South, Lawrence, whose work was more typically inspired by personal experience and family history — his own parents were among the thousands who traveled north seeking employment during the Great Migration — turned his attention to the first few decades of the nation.

An Integrated History

What possibilities did Lawrence see in this history? He began work on the series in 1954, the same year the United States Supreme Court ruled to desegregate American schools in Brown v. Board of Education, precipitating a violent backlash in southern states. In this context, what is striking about Lawrence’s paintings is that they offer an integrated vision of revolutionary struggle.

An early image in the series centers Crispus Attucks, a dockworker of African and Native descent who is thought to have been the first colonial to die in the revolution. As the wounded Attucks crumples to the ground, clutching his chest, his co-conspirators react in anger and horror.

Another painting represents a violent battle between red-coated Hessians and the Continental Army. Amid a frenzied snarl of angled limbs and interlocking bayonets, a mounted white officer and black soldier suffer the same fate, both reeling backward from bloody head wounds.

In this painting and throughout the series, Lawrence makes a point of centering black people in his scenes of early American history. Today, such images might suggest a Hamilton-style recasting of history — a hollow multiculturalism in the service of a hollow patriotism, sounding alarm bells for those of us rightly skeptical of neoliberalism’s cooptation of the aesthetics of diversity. Lawrence’s concern, however, was with historical fidelity, which he deployed as a corrective to segregated mainstream history.

Lawrence prepared to paint Struggle by consulting sources at Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. His question, as he posed it in a later interview, was “how…and to what degree the Negro had participated in American history.” His research turned up not only information on identifiable figures like Attucks, but on the nine thousand persons of African descent who served in the colonial army, some of whom enlisted as free men, and others of whom were promised freedom for their military service.

Perhaps inspired by W. E. B. Du Bois, whom he cites admiringly in the same interview, Lawrence drew from alternative sources to craft a revisionist history of the nation’s formation. Much as Du Bois does in Black Reconstruction’s account of the Civil War’s “general strike,” in which enslaved men and women depleted the economic power of the Confederacy and secured a Union victory by emancipating themselves from plantation labor, Lawrence restores agency to black people and highlights their largely unrecognized contributions to the revolutionary cause.