Black Sunday and the Great Migration
Chloe Nguyen

Of all the events of the Dust Bowl years, the one that fascinates me most is Black Sunday. The worst storm, remembered as Black Sunday, swept across the plains on April 14, 1935. Witnesses described a black wall of dust that turned day into night and forced people to take shelter wherever they could find it. Dust from the plains storms reached as far east as Washington, D.C., and fell on ships in the Atlantic Ocean.

I try to imagine what it would have been like to see that wall of dust coming toward my house. People who lived through it said that they could not see their own hands in front of their faces. Birds flew ahead of the storm in huge flocks, and some families thought the end of the world had arrived.

For many families, Black Sunday was the final straw. The storms drove roughly two and a half million people out of the plains states by 1940. Many of these migrants traveled west to California, where they found low wages, crowded camps, and hostility from local residents.

The novel The Grapes of Wrath tells the story of one such family, the Joads, who lose their farm in Oklahoma and set out for California. The book made many Americans aware of how the migrants were treated, and it caused an uproar in the places it described.

Black Sunday is remembered today as a warning about what can happen when people push the land too hard. It is also a reminder that the victims of environmental disasters are often the people with the least power to prevent them.
