Black Farmworkers in the Central Valley: Escaping Jim Crow For a Subtler Kind of Racism
Today, when you think of farmworkers in California’s fields, picking strawberries, pruning grape vines, cutting lettuce, you probably think of migrants from Mexico or Central America. But less than a century ago, many of those jobs were done by dust bowl migrants from places like Oklahoma. The 1930s brought over 1 million newly displaced people to California, especially the Central Valley. Not all of them were white families. In the 1940s and 50s, a wave of African-American families came to the Central Valley, lured by the promise of jobs, and an escape from racist Jim Crow laws. Alex Hall brings us the stories of two families whose dreams of getting ahead were shaped by the racism they found here in California.
Letter to My California Dreamer: To My Grandparents Who Escaped the Dust Bowl
Listener Kimberly Brown's grandparents were part of a wave of mostly white migrants fleeing the dust bowl – although they were American-born, discrimination against “Okies” meant they had to pay a smuggler to get across the California border. She wrote to them as part of our series "Letter to my California Dreamer" - where we've been asking you to write a letter to one of the first people in your family who came to California in search of a better life.
When the Central Valley Was the 'Center of the Country Music Universe'
The famous Bakersfield Sound was pioneered by musicians with roots in Oklahoma, Arkansas and Texas, starting just after the Second World War. It’s music that Robert Price has spent much of his life writing about – he’s a longtime columnist, and former executive editor for the Bakersfield Californian, and wrote a book about the Bakersfield Sound. He tells us that musicians like Buck Owens and Merle Haggard had very different influences, but a few things in common, including a secret weapon that helped them “rattle the aluminum siding."