"My paintings consistently portray the lives and struggles of Black Americans . . . their concerns with everyday reality and the dignity of the poor and all human effort toward freedom and justice." - Jacob Lawrence

Jacob Lawrence (1917 - 2000) was a painter, storyteller, and educator who was impressed by the personalities and historic struggles of his people. Unable to express everything about these heroes in a single painting, he developed works in a series. Following his historic cycles of Toussaint L'Ouverture, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and Migration, Lawrence took on the theme of John Brown, the legendary abolitionist.

In 1851 John Brown organized groups of slaves to resist their masters, founded a settlement for 3,000 freed slaves in New York, and served in Congress, but by 1855 he dedicated himself fully to the abolitionist movement and began armed resistance to proslavery forces. John Brown's last guerrilla action on October 16, 1859 was to lead a group of men on a raid of the government arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia. They were captured and brought to trial with John Brown found guilty of treason and hung. The raid and trial served to increase the tension over slavery in the US, leading to the Civil War by its contribution to Lincoln's election and Jefferson Davis' assertion that the raid was grounds for the South to leave the Union.