Black Sunday: The Dust Storm That Turned Day Into Night

Wheat prices were high due to World War I, and farmers in the 1910s and 1920s across Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico had new, powerful mechanical tractors. The best advice they received was to plow up the native prairie grass and grow more wheat. Over 30 million acres of deep-rooted shortgrass, which had anchored the soil for centuries, were plowed under, replaced by shallow-rooted wheat. When crops failed, or the land was left fallow, there was no root system to anchor the soil.

In 1931, a decade of relatively rainy weather on the Southern Plains came to an end, as a serious drought arrived. Without rain, which had been covering up the results of all the tilling, and with no living roots to keep the soil together, the dead farm field turned into fine, crumbly dust. Dry years and high winds produced more and more “black blizzards,” smaller storms, between 1932 and 1934, until the risk seemed almost routine. The Black Sunday storm was still to come.

On April 14, 1935, Palm Sunday, a week before Easter, clear skies and warm temperatures in the upper 70s and low 80s greeted people across Kansas, Oklahoma, and the Texas Panhandle that morning. It came after weeks of smaller dust storms. Eager to breathe easy, thousands of folks went to church, had picnics, or worked in the fields and gardens. There were no warnings on the radio, and there was no weather radar system to tell them the calm wouldn’t last long.

On April 14, by mid-afternoon, a big slug of Arctic air, called a “norther,” fell down from Canada through Nebraska and into Kansas. It smashed into the warm air that was sitting over the plains all morning, and temperatures fell 30 to 40 degrees in less than two hours. Minutes before it arrived, people in the way could see birds fly south in panic and cattle get nervous as a low roar grew from the north.

The leading edge of that Arctic air plowed into the ground, scooping up loose topsoil into a wall of dust roughly 1,000 feet high and hundreds of miles wide on the horizon. The wind was at least 50 or 60 miles an hour, and it drove the dust wall forward across Kansas, Oklahoma, and northern Texas. This was fine, powdery silt, not sand. To anyone who saw it coming, it appeared as if a black mountain were advancing toward them.

The wall of dust reached Dodge City, Kansas, in mid-afternoon, then swept on through Beaver, Oklahoma, Perryton, Texas, and Boise City, Oklahoma, during the next two hours. By evening, it reached Amarillo, Texas. Town after town dropped to zero visibility within a matter of minutes after the storm arrived, with hardly any warning from place to place.

With the wall of dust rolling over every town, the airborne silt was so thick it blotted out all light. It was midnight at noon. Streets and houses were completely darkened, so dark you couldn’t see your hand if you held it inches from your face. For about 12 to 45 minutes in any given location, the time it took the thickest part of the cloud to pass overhead, darkness reigned, with only a brown haze lingering through the night.

Inside the swirling dust, trillions of tumbling particles rubbed together and built up enormous amounts of static electricity. Fences made of barbed wire crackled and emitted blue sparks in the night. Cars broke down because the static discharge short-circuited the ignition system, leaving drivers helpless in the middle of the road. Some drivers dragged metal chains behind their cars to act as ground wires to keep the static discharge from short-circuiting their cars’ electrical systems. Thankfully, no one was killed by the electric discharges.

Some Plains families were caught completely unawares, with no radio to warn them of the approaching storm, and unable to see or hear what was going on beyond their homes. Many came to believe that Judgment Day had come. They held their households together, sang hymns and prayed, while the storm raged outside. These anecdotes don’t survive in formal records, but they are well documented in oral histories and individual memories, recounted again and again by people who experienced that afternoon.

When the storm caught Ed and Ada Phillips and their 6-year-old daughter while they were outdoors near Boise City, Oklahoma, the family sought shelter in an abandoned two-room adobe ruin. They were crammed inside with 10 other stranded travelers. For about four hours, the occupants of the house held wet rags to their faces while silt sifted into the dwelling from cracks in the roof and walls. All 13 survived.

The cattle, farm animals, and wild jackrabbits that were outdoors at the time had no means of filtering the air they breathed. The fine silica particles combined with moisture in their lungs, then dried into a thick mud that clogged their respiratory systems, causing many deaths in grazing lands throughout Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. There was never an official tally for the number of animal deaths, but ranchers throughout the area reported finding carcasses in their fields after the clouds had cleared.

As the storm swept south across the plains that afternoon, it ripped millions of acres of cultivated fields and drove some 300 million tons of rich topsoil into the air. Fine soil traveled thousands of miles eastward in the gale, dusting Midwestern cities and reaching all the way to the Atlantic coast. But the greatest damage occurred in the dry-farming regions of the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles and southwestern Kansas.

In the days after the storm, fine dust crept into farmhouses through keyholes, window sashes, and cracks between the floorboards. Family members nailed wet sheets to the windows and wedged rags under the doors, yet dust accumulated to a depth of several inches on the floors, tables, and beds. No house in the storm’s path was completely weatherproof, and thus every house was vulnerable to the health effects of the dust.

During the following weeks, hospitals and medical clinics in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas overflowed with people having difficulty breathing. Dust pneumonia, or the “brown plague,” was the name given by people to a lung inflammation caused when they inhaled microscopic shards of crystalline silica dust during the storm. The illness was not a disease but an injury, and babies, small children, and old people were most vulnerable. Hundreds of victims perished across the region that spring.

AP reporter Robert E. Geiger and photographer Harry G. Eisenhard found themselves in the storm six miles north of Boise City, Oklahoma. After it passed, Geiger went to a telegraph office and filed his report. It ran in newspapers the following day and was the first to use the term “the southwestern dust bowl.” AP editor Edward Stanley took the term “dust bowl” and sent it out nationwide, and it took hold as the name for both the place and the period.

Hugh Hammond Bennett, the director of the federal Soil Erosion Service, had been lobbying Congress to authorize federal funds for soil conservation efforts for years. In the spring of 1935, when Congress began considering legislation, real dust from storms in the West actually blew over Washington, D.C. When Bennett appeared before the Senate on April 19, five days after Black Sunday, he pointed to the dust cloud covering the capital as evidence that federal intervention was necessary.

On April 27, 1935, just 13 days after Black Sunday, President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Soil Conservation Act into law. The act named soil erosion a “menace to the national welfare” and established a new Soil Conservation Service within the Department of Agriculture. Hugh Hammond Bennett, the soil scientist who had testified before Congress only a few days earlier, was named its first chief.

Woody Guthrie was just 22 at the time, a fledgling folk singer. He lived in Pampa, Texas, on the fateful day and said he could hear the people around him crying out in fear, thinking it might be their last chance to say goodbye. He turned it into songs, including “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know Yuh” and “The Great Dust Storm,” which came out a few years later on his album Dust Bowl Ballads.

During the 1930s, some 2.5 million people migrated from the Great Plains as a result of drought, dust, and the Great Depression. Only about 200,000 to 300,000 of these people actually went to California via Route 66 and sought agricultural jobs there. Most of the others moved to Midwestern cities or settled in the Pacific Northwest. This migration was not a sudden event but rather occurred gradually over many years, long after Black Sunday.

With assistance from the new Soil Conservation Service, High Plains farmers abandoned plowing straight rows for contour plowing, terracing, strip cropping, and crop rotation, reducing regional soil erosion by as much as 65% by 1938. The last years of the Dust Bowl were marked by normal rainfall on the Great Plains in late 1939, allowing wheat cultivation to finally begin recovering.

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