Jacob Lawrence was born on September 7, 1917, in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The young Lawrence’s parents—Rosa Lee, a domestic worker from Virginia, and Jacob, a railroad cook from South Carolina—were among the many who moved from the South to the North in the first years of the Great Migration. In 1919, the family moved to Easton, Pennsylvania, at the time a commercial center and prominent transportation hub for the steel industry. Lawrence’s sister Geraldine was born that year.