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Throughout his lengthy artistic career, Lawrence concentrated on depicting the history and struggles of African Americans.

Lawrence's work often portrayed important periods in African-American history.

The artist was twenty-one years old when his series of paintings of the Haitian general Toussaint L ’ Ouverture was shown in an exhibit of African American artists at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

This impressive work was followed by a series of paintings of the lives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, as well as a series of pieces about the abolitionist John Brown.

Lawrence was only twenty-three when he completed the sixty-panel set of narrative paintings entitled Migration of the Negro, now called The Migration Series.

The series, a moving portrayal of the migration of hundreds of thousands of African Americans from the rural South to the North after World War I and their struggle to adjust to Northern cities, was shown in New York, and brought him national recognition.

In the 1940s Lawrence was given his first major solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and became the most celebrated African American painter in the country.