Dust Bowl

During the great depression, drought hit the Great Plains states. While weather was the catalyst for the Dust Bowl, the root cause was poor farming and soil conservation techniques on land that was not suited for growing corn. When the thin layer of topsoil was depleted, the land became unsuitable for cash crops. This led to farm failures and mortgage foreclosures. Migrants who made the trek west to California were called "Okies" or "Arkies", because they flooded the labor supply of the agricultural fields.

Also much of the country's African-American population lived in rural areas and worked on farms owned by the white landowners. For rural African-Americans, the Great Depression was hard to distinguish when poverty was always a way of life for them. Living conditions became even worse when some landowners lost their properties during the Depression and the dustbowl. African-Americans had always relied on subsistence farming to make up for their low wage earnings. In any case, most shared what little they had. As bad all this way life was considerably harder for African-Americans living in urban areas. However, there were many African-Americans who continued to work doing hard manual labor or working in areas inherently dangerous such as in foundries, while others worked as domestic servants for white folks. A smaller number worked for the railroads, steel mills, coalmines, school boards, etc. There were some enterprising African-Americans who made a fairly reasonable living operating small businesses. Between 1929 and 1932, the country and the world kept spiraling downward into depression. Many looked to the government to do something to solve the problems. But U.S. President Herbert Hoover was slow to give help, even though he was from Iowa. Hoover stubbornly refused to help unemployed workers in urban areas as well. He vetoed a bill that would have created a federal unemployment agency and opposed a plan to use public money to put people to work building roads and government buildings. Franklin Delano Roosevelt luckily gave hope for these people. He promised a New Deal. And so, much of FDR's New Deal was designed to help farmers and African Americans. These New Deal plans created so many jobs that these people desperately needed. Segregation was no longer an issue and Blacks were able to join the military and also this opened many job opportunities for them. Sadly while all these things were beneficial for blacks, they still faced discrimination in the workplace and lower paying jobs. On the farmers side President Roosevelt ordered that the Civilian Conservation Corps plant a huge belt of more than 200 million trees from Canada to Abilene, Texas, to break the wind, hold water in the soil, and hold the soil itself in place. The administration also began to educate farmers on soil conservation and anti-erosion techniques, including crop rotation, strip farming, contour plowing, terracing and other

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