US artist Jacob Lawrence dies

The death has been announced in the United States of the country's foremost black artist, Jacob Lawrence.

He was eighty-two.

Raised in Harlem in New York during the heyday of jazz, Lawrence began painting from a young age, and in 1941, became the first African American painter to be shown at a major US art gallery.

His depictions of slavery, race riots and the civil rights movement were praised for their boldness.

Inspired by the experience of his parents, his most famous work, Migration, is a series of sixty different pictures showing the aspirations of black Americans in the period after the first world war.

From the newsroom of the BBC World Service