Like many African Americans, Walter Ellison migrated from the rural South (also known as the “Black Belt”) to the urban North after World War I. Ellison, originally from Eatonton, Georgia, moved to Chicago in the 1920s. In the 1930s, he attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was employed by the Illinois Art Project of the Works Progress Administration. He was also actively involved in the South Side Community Art Center (see no. 15). His work was featured in “The Art of the American Negro (1851 to 1940),” held in Chicago, and in the first “Negro Annual Exhibition” at Atlanta University (now Clark Atlanta University) in 1942.

As demonstrated in books such as Richard Wright’s Black Boy (New York, 1937) and in paintings such as Jacob Lawrence’s Migration series (1941; Washington, D.C., The Phillips Collection, and New York, The Museum of Modern Art), many African American writers and artists have used trains and migration as powerful metaphors. On one hand, they can symbolize movement, the future, and hope for prosperity. On the other, they can signify displacement, dispossession, and loss. Ellison’s Train Station depicts an energetic scene in which many travelers depart from a central terminal. The composition reflects how social values at that time prevented blacks and whites from mixing.

Each of the painting’s three sections reveals the artist’s perceptions of the injustices associated with inequitable social conditions. On the left, white passengers board southbound trains for vacations, while, on the right, black passengers board northbound trains for destinations such as Chicago and Detroit, hopeful of being welcomed in cities where they can prosper. A sign above a doorway on the platform identifying the colored-only exit further underscores the dehumanizing conditions that African Americans had to endure at this time. In the center section, black porters help white passengers, but black travelers proceed unassisted.

The sharply exaggerated perspective creates a space that appears physically inaccessible, perhaps symbolizing remote destinations and unimaginable conditions at the end of the journey. By placing his initials on the suitcase that an old man in the right foreground tries to lift, Ellison inscribed his own experiences of racism and economic struggle into the work, creating an autobiographical account of his personal migration north. (ADB)