California's 'Bum Blockade'

This message comes from Progressive Insurance and the name your price tool. It helps you find car insurance options in your budget. Try it today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. Not available in all states. Hey, everyone. Before we start the show, you may have heard that president Trump has issued an executive order seeking to block all federal funding to NPR. This is the latest in a series of threats to media organizations across the country. Millions of people, people like you, people like me, depend on the NPR network as a vital source of news, entertainment, information, and connection. We are proud to be here for you. And now, more than ever, we need you to be here for us. It's time to join the movement to defend public media. Visit donate.npr.org. And if you already support us via NPR Plus or another means, thank you. Your support means so much to us now more than ever. You help make NPR shows freely available to everyone. We are proud to do this work for you and with you. Now on to the show. The only time that that I really remember that I was scared was that dark Sunday. Oklahoma, 04/14/1935. We did see it tepid. It rolled in like small small, almost. On the horizon, a wall of black dust over 500 feet tall, stretching as far as the eye could see. We just have a quiet. The neighbor said there was birds flying ahead of that storm. And, that storm hit. 60 mile per hour winds. You couldn't see your hand in front of your face. The storm ripped through six states from Nebraska to Texas. In some places, total darkness lasted an hour. Blank. Cold blank. It was as black as the ancient space. It was a day that haunted the minds of those who lived through it. They called it Black Sunday. You just felt like you were gonna choke. You know, that dust was just just you couldn't hardly breathe. If you knew anything about the script scripture, you know what it says, that moon will turn dark and this, that, and the other. So we just had the feeling that this is the end of time. I thought that was the end of the world. The very next day, a journalist coined a new term to describe what was happening across the Great Plains. He called it the dust bowl. What you just heard were oral histories conducted with people who lived in the heart of it. That those dust storms just devastated the country. They were perpetual, and you can depend on it. The dust was relentless and inescapable. It covered every inch of people's homes. It choked the crops. It filled people's lungs, causing hundreds, maybe thousands of people to die from dust pneumonia. The Dust Bowl made the Great Plains nearly uninhabitable. So many of them left. Oh, …