What was okie migration

Instead of immediate riches, they often found squalor in roadside ditch encampments. Delbert left and Alvin Apetz knew several families who left for California. The plight of the Okies and other plains migrants caught the sympathy of people across the country. In part, this was because these migrants were white, in contrast to the Mexican and Filipino workers who supplied the "factory" farms with the seasonal labor needed before and after Okies arrived.

The Okies also came in family groups and were in desperate straights, living in tents or out of the back of a car or truck. Photographs were taken of the migrants from the Great Plains and published around the world. John Steinbeck visited a migrant camp in California and wrote a magnificent piece of fiction The Grapes of Wrath which still sells millions of copies today.

Florence Thompson says she, and many others, lived the life that Steinbeck dramatized. Their story is part of a larger story of migration into and out of the plains during the 30s. Written by Bill Ganzel of the Ganzel Group. Category: news and politics disasters. How did people travel during the Dust Bowl? How were farmers affected in the Dust Bowl? What caused the Great Depression? How many people left Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl?

How many Okies moved to California? Who built the Arvin farm labor camp? What does Okie mean in Spanish? Will the Dust Bowl happen again? Why did the Dust Bowl farmers leave? What is an Arkie? What was the importance of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath?

Did California end up being the promised land Why or why not? Who were Hoovervilles named for? President Hoover. Where were hoovervilles located?

What are Okies in Grapes of Wrath? When did Dorothea Lange start taking pictures? Similar Asks. Popular Asks. He nearly died of dysentery on a Bakersfield riverbank under one of hundreds of ragged tents. But the Okies were a resourceful lot.

What was not so apparent at the time, though, was that the Okies did not come as the customary migrant laborers to follow the harvests. They came as families, strong and close families for the most part, looking for a piece of land where they could take root.

And did. Today Scales, 57, owns more than a piece of land. He leases it out. An exact count does not exist, but one study estimates that as many as 3.

Few of the children of that impoverished, homeless army attained the wealth of Scales, although a surprising number did. Many, though, pulled themselves up in a single generation to high levels of success, even prominence, across the whole spectrum of society. One became president of Bakersfield College, another head of a commuter airline, another the chief of a chain of hardware stores.

Most have simply blended an Okie thread into the tapestry of California. Their origins have become irrelevant as they have become as invisible as all of the unidentified others who fit the broad definition of good citizens. So they find it unfair that only the inevitable share of misfits and troublemakers among them are still identified as Okies, as though it were a bad gene.

Across the Kern River from Bakersfield, over a bridge that practically spans the site of the long-gone Hooverville, is Oildale, a town of 25, Oildale to this day is known as Little Oklahoma. According to Ed Woodruff, a black cab driver, Oildale also is a town of occasional Ku Klux Klan rallies and at least one cross-burning on the bridge from Bakersfield. To Woodruff, the message to blacks was clear: Stay out. In the last year, three Oildale residents were convicted of hate crimes against blacks.

It was along the ditch banks and eucalyptus groves around Bakersfield that most of the Okies clustered in their misery before questing northward. The irony is that the message they received from the residents there was the same as the one Ed Woodruff received from their descendants. Stay out.