The press called them Dust Bowl refugees, although few came from the area devastated by dust storms. Instead they came from a broad area encompassing four southern plains states: Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Missouri. More than half a million left the region in the 1930s, mostly heading for California. In a decade when migration rates dropped nationwide, the families leaving the southern plains attracted a great deal of attention. But actually they were part of a migration sequence from that region that had been going on for decades and would continue long after the 1930s.

The westward migration of White folks from Oklahoma and neighboring states can be seen as part of a broader exodus from the South that included the Great Migration of southern Black families and still larger outmigration of southern White families. The Southern Diaspora saw nearly 20 million people leave the economically troubled South in the first seven and half decades of the 20th century. Click here learn more about the Southern Diaspora and explore our interactive maps and charts Below we focus on the 1930s Dust Bowl migration to California.

It became one of those rare books that not only records history but makes history. Even as the first copies of The Grapes of Wrath rolled off the presses in the spring of 1939, it was clear that the novel was going to have an extraordinary impact. John Steinbeck's story of a dispossessed Oklahoma farm family struggling to survive among the fields of plenty in California touched the conscience of a nation.

Steinbeck was not the first to write about the Dust Bowl migrants and their plight. For the better part of four years the story had been earning newspaper headlines, especially in California, where by 1939 the public was in the midst of a massive debate over the "Okie crisis." But Steinbeck did something that the journalists, photographers, and politicians could not do: he made sure that the Okies would never be forgotten. The Grapes of Wrath turned the Dust Bowl migrants into one of the enduring symbols of the Great Depression.

Ever since 1939, Americans of various generations have found in the tragic heroism of the Joad family a metaphor for the nation's depression-era experience. And what has become of the real Dust Bowl migrants, the Oklahomans, Arkansans, Texans, and Missourians who were the models for Steinbeck's book? It is fitting that we update the story. Steinbeck never did. It is too bad, for he would have been quite surprised. The experiences of the Dust Bowl migrants in subsequent decades defied many of the understandings and expectations that governed his 1939 portrait.

The Grapes of Wrath foresaw a difficult future for the Okies and Arkies. Steinbeck was not at all sure that California could or would provide an adequate home, and he thought a great deal depended upon important changes in the structure of California agriculture.

The Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s plays an important and complicated role in the way Americans talk about the history of poverty and public policy in their country. For almost seventy years the story of white families from Oklahoma and neighboring states making their way to California in the midst of the Great Depression has been kept alive by journalists and filmmakers, college teachers and museum curators, songwriters and novelists, and of course historians.

Although it was but one episode out of many struggles with poverty during the 1930s, the Dust Bowl migration became something of synecdoche, the single most common image that later generations would use to memorialize the hardships of that decade. The continuing fascination with the Dust Bowl saga also has something to do with the way race and poverty have interacted over the generations since the 1930s. Here is one of the last great stories depicting white Americans as victims of severe poverty and social prejudice. It is a story that many Americans have needed to tell, for many different reasons.

The story begins in the summer of 1935. That is when the economist Paul Taylor realized that something new was happening in California's agricultural areas, particularly the wondrously productive San Joaquin Valley which supplied two dozen different kinds of fruits and vegetables to the nation's grocery stories and the highest quality cotton fiber to its textile mills. The workers who picked those crops had been mostly Mexicans, Filipinos, and single white males before the Depression. Now Taylor, an expert on farm labor issues, noticed more and more whites looking for harvest labor jobs, many of them traveling as families, a lot of them with license plates from Oklahoma, Texas, and Arkansas.