The Origin of “Okies”

These were the people forced onto the road, with thousands living in tent cities along dusty highways.

For many, those highways led west.  California became the land of hope in the imagination of the impoverished, a golden dream soon crushed by the reality of life as field laborers, forced to endure hunger while living in squalid camps, forced to accept wage exploitation by large commercial agricultural interests.

These people swept up in events beyond their control were written about with great compassion by John Steinbeck in his novel The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939.

What few realise, is that the woman in this series of photographs – Florence Leona Thompson (born Florence Christie) – was a woman with deep roots in multi-ethnic Southern Appalachia.

Long before Latino peoples became the archetypal source of migrant farm labour, America drew on its own inland underclass for a cheap migrant workforce.

Multi-ethnic American families have often been disparagingly, disgracefully, and inaccurately described as “white trash”.  Some of these same people later appear on history’s stage as “Okies”.

With extended kin communities in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia, West Virginia, North Georgia, Arkansas, Southern Missouri, and Oklahoma, these people regularly dispersed into Ohio, Indiana, Michigan and elsewhere to supply bodies and numbers for the back-breaking labour of crop-picking.

The actual ethnic roots of women like Florence Christie are mostly forgotten, because most Americans today believe that one of two things befell indigenous Americans:

1) They simply disappeared or “went extinct” through disease and warfare

2) They all ended-up on federal “Indian Reservations”

The actual ethnic roots of women like Florence Christie are also mostly forgotten, because most Americans today believe that people who are NOT extinct, or NOT on a reservation, and are not “black” or not “Latino”, MUST be “white”.

These are the falsehoods, and this is the lack of understanding, at the heart of the American caste system.

Florence Christie was not “white”.  Nor was she “black”, “red” or “mulatto”.  She was Cherokee, Welsh, Irish, and more.

After years of investigations, I have come to call these people “Old Mix Americans“.

Most of all, she was a human being – a woman who felt shamed by becoming the face of Depression Era degradation and poverty.

John Steinbeck, the man who wrote the truth as he saw it, had to start carrying a pistol “just in case”.

Large landholders in California didn’t take kindly to what they viewed as “communist” interference in their capitalist “rights”.

The Grapes of Wrath was one of the earliest books to be burned and banned in some parts of America.

A sure sign that it is a book well worth reading.

#dustbowl #steinbeck #history #beforewewerewhite