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Dust Bowl Survivors Gather At Oklahoma Capitol To Mark 80 Years Since ‘Black Sunday’

On April 14, 1935, a rolling mountain of dust and sand swept through Oklahoma, choked out the sun and filled homes with dirt piles so high residents had to clean their homes with shovels.

It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon near the town of Forgan in Oklahoma’s Panhandle. Pauline Hodges was five at the time. She and her mother were visiting a neighbor when her friend’s father ran up to the backdoor.

“‘Get the cellar quick, it’s a bad storm!’ he said, and I’m going to quote, ‘Oh my god, it’s as dark as night.’,” Hodges said. “And it was. It looked like night. There was so much dirt in the air and that made it so black.”

The Black Sunday storm has become an icon of the Dust Bowl and an illustration of poor farming, land and water management practices in drought-prone regions.

At the Capitol event Tuesday officials with the Oklahoma Conservation Commission and U.S. Department of Agriculture told lawmakers those lessons are especially relevant today as Oklahoma enters its fifth year of drought.

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Joe was a founding reporter for StateImpact Oklahoma (2011-2019) covering the intersection of economic policy, energy and environment, and the residents of the state. He previously served as Managing Editor of Urban Tulsa Weekly, as the Arts & Entertainment Editor at Oklahoma Gazette and worked as a Staff Writer for The Oklahoman. Joe was a weekly arts and entertainment correspondent for KGOU from 2007-2010. He grew up in Bartlesville, Okla. and studied journalism at the University of Central Oklahoma.
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