Personal Accounts of Black Sunday and Dust Storms
During the 1930s, many residents of the Dust Bowl kept accounts and journals of their life and of the storms that hit their area. Collections of accounts of the dust storms during the 1930s have been compiled over the years and are now available in book collections and online.
In a New Republic article, Avis D. Carlson wrote:
"People caught in their own yards grope for the doorstep. Cars come to a standstill, for no light in the world can penetrate that swirling murk…. The nightmare is deepest during the storms. But on the occasional bright day and the usual gray day we cannot shake from it. We live with the dust, eat it, sleep with it, watch it strip us of possessions and the hope of possessions."
Lawrence Svobida was a wheat farmer in Kansas during the 1930s. He experienced the period of dust storms, and the effect that they had on the surrounding environment and the society. His observations and feelings are available in his memoirs, Farming the Dust Bowl. Here he describes an approaching dust storm:
"… At other times a cloud is seen to be approaching from a distance of many miles. Already it has the banked appearance of a cumulus cloud, but it is black instead of white and it hangs low, seeming to hug the earth. Instead of being slow to change its form, it appears to be rolling on itself from the crest downward. As it sweeps onward, the landscape is progressively blotted out. Birds fly in terror before the storm, and only those that are strong of wing may escape. The smaller birds fly until they are exhausted, then fall to the ground, to share the fate of the thousands of jack rabbits which perish from suffocation."
The Black Sunday storm is detailed in the 2012 Ken Burns PBS documentary The Dust Bowl.
Read more about this topic: Black Sunday (storm)
Famous quotes containing the words personal, accounts, black, sunday, dust and/or storms:
“Q: Have you made personal sacrifices for the sake of your career?
A: Leaving a three-month-old infant in another person’s house for nine hours, five days a week is a personal sacrifice.”
—Alice Cort (20th century)
“Genius lasts longer than Beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)
“Don’t look now, God, we’re all right.
All the suicides are eating Black Bean Soup;
the Dalmatians, our turnip, our spotted parasite
snoozles in her chair.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“History is made in the class struggle and not in bed.”
—Alex Mitchell, British left-wing journalist. quoted in Sunday Times (London, 29 Dec. 1985)
“A man’s destination is his own village,
His own cooking fire, and his wife’s cooking;
To sit in front of his own door at sunset
And see his grandson, and his neighbour’s grandson
Playing in the dust together.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“I hold it that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical.... It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)