Heading for the Higher-Paying Jobs represents with an epic aura the historic migration of African Americans from rural sharecropping and cotton picking to urban industrial and manufacturing jobs. Figures are moving away from the stylized, yellowing cotton patch at the lower left toward the blackness of a coal mine and the flames and furnaces of factories and steel mills. Even the fam animals are fleeing the farms. The picture reveals a deep commitment to the "holy story," to a faith in progress and the ability of society to recognize its own best interest, and to Dial's intense personal identification with the destiny of African Americans, of America, and of humanity.
