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. Survivors of the storm met Tuesday at the state Capitol to mark the eightieth anniversary of “Black Sunday."
It was a beautiful, sunny afternoon near the town of Forgan in Oklahoma’s Panhandle. Pauline Hodges was 5-years-old at the time. She and her mother were visiting a neighbor when her friend’s father ran up to the backdoor and yelled...
“‘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.’ 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 officials with the Oklahoma Conservation Commission and USDA told lawmakers those lessons are especially relevant today as Oklahoma enters its fifth year of drought.
