The Dust Bowl's Black Farmers

The canonical Dust Bowl story is white. John Steinbeck's Okies packing the truck for California. Dorothea Lange's photographs of gaunt white faces at the side of the road. Woody Guthrie's songs about the Dust Bowl highway. These images and stories were real, and they were the ones the federal government commissioned, funded, and circulated, because the Farm Security Administration needed to build political support for New Deal agricultural programs, and the audience they needed to move was white.

Black tenant farmers and sharecroppers in western Oklahoma and Kansas were displaced by the Dust Bowl in comparable numbers. Their farms failed for the same reasons: the same drought, the same stripped sod, the same economic collapse. But their migration stories went largely unrecorded by the photographers and writers the federal government sent to document the disaster.

The Library of Congress American Folklife Center holds some of what remains of the Black farm-family testimony from this period, collected by Federal Writers' Project interviewers in the nineteen thirties and forties. Those testimonies document a pattern: Black families were routinely excluded from or received less from the federal relief programs, the seed distributions, the emergency loan programs, that helped white families survive or start over. The New Deal's agricultural programs were administered locally, through county agents and committees, and in Oklahoma and Kansas in the nineteen thirties, local administration meant white administration.

The Dust Bowl migration of the nineteen thirties has a white public memory and a Black history that was largely denied the public memory that would have preserved it. The Kansas Historical Society holds documentation of Black farming communities in the Dust Bowl region that is among the most complete available, but it remains less cited and less known than the Steinbeck account it runs alongside.