Here, Thornton Dial represents the historic migration of African Americans from rural to urban communities and from slavery and sharecropping to paid industrial labor. To illustrate this passage, Dial created a succession of three visual fields: a yellow cotton patch in the lower left dissolves into the blackness of underground mines, which explodes into the red-hot furnaces of steel mills. The overseer’s whip writhes all the way across the painting, suggesting the powerlessness of the worker.
