Jacob Lawrence, Confrontation on the Bridge, 1975
From the Cleveland Museum of Art:
Lawrence’s work interprets momentous experiences in the lives of African Americans. This print commemorates the 1965 civil rights marches near Selma, Alabama, in which police repeatedly stopped activists at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The powerful scene is composed by juxtaposing flat, vivid colors, and by contrasting a symbolic vicious dog with terrified yet determined demonstrators. These events, which brought long-standing progress to the country as a whole, are memorialized here as universal themes of freedom and justice.
