Black Sunday: When a Dust Storm Swallowed the Great Plains

On April 14, 1935, the residents of Dodge City, Kansas, were relishing a rare respite from the dust storms that had raged for years. The morning air was still, the sun was shining against a field of blue—but that afternoon, the sky disappeared.

Thirteen-year-old Harley Holladay was bringing in the family laundry when the storm struck. “I couldn’t see anything at all. It was black as night. I got down on my hands and knees and tried to crawl toward the house,” he remembered. “I finally felt the porch and reached up and opened the screen door and crawled inside.”

A black wall of dust surged around Harley’s home and many others in Dodge City, a town of 10,000 people on the vast plains of southwestern Kansas. Propelled by a cold front from the north, the cloud erased the sun and dropped visibility to zero within minutes as winds screamed across southern Nebraska, Kansas, eastern Colorado and New Mexico, Oklahoma, and Texas. 

The Dodge City office of the National Weather Service recorded the apocalyptic scene. Some residents saw hundreds of geese and ducks flying ahead of the dust cloud before darkness fell in an instant. Others stumbled through the swirling grit and later complained of “dust pneumonia,” their lungs choked with dirt. “The onrushing cloud, the darkness, and the thick, choking dirt, made this storm one of terror and the worst, while it lasted, ever known here,” the bureau’s log reported. 

Eventually dubbed Black Sunday, the April 14 event wasn’t the first dust storm to blanket the plains. In fact, Dodge City had just lived through a string of smaller storms that left the streets coated in several inches of fine dirt. But Black Sunday marked the most devastating dust storm in American history, putting Harley and hundreds of thousands of others throughout the Great Plains at the center of one of the worst ecological disasters ever known—the Dust Bowl.

1. The Dirty Thirties
2. “Black Blizzards”
3. From Black Sunday to the Dust Bowl

The Dirty Thirties

The events leading to the Dust Bowl started with the Homestead Act of 1862. The federal legislation gave 160 acres of public land to any adult who was willing to live on and cultivate that property for five years, after which time they would legally own it. By 1904, the government had distributed 500 million acres to farmers, ranchers, miners, loggers, and railroad companies. 

But the new settlers were mostly unfamiliar with the plains’ soil and climate. They plowed up vast swaths of native prairie previously stabilized by deep-rooted grasses. Then came the rise of mechanized farming tools, such as tractors, and wild swings in the price of wheat that led to the cultivation of even larger tracts of land in the 1920s. Without proper land management practices to replenish the soil from season to season, its vital nutrients were stripped in just a few years.

Finally, severe drought set in by the early 1930s, rendering 35 million acres of land useless for farming while topsoil eroded from another 125 million acres.

“Black Blizzards”

While dust storms weren’t new in the area, their frequency increased, from 14 storms in 1932 to 28 the following year. They also grew more intense without thick crops or native grasses to anchor the soil, causing “black blizzards” of dust to roll across the plains. Over a period of two days in 1934, winds carried about 350 million tons of dirt eastward. Ships sitting 300 miles out in the Atlantic saw Oklahoma’s dust coating their decks.

Then came Black Sunday.

On that April day, winds started sweeping across the plains at 100 miles per hour, surpassing hurricane-force levels. A cold front collided with warm air, initiating the swirling storm of dust, which towered more than 10,000 feet high and blew through a swath of the Great Plains 800 miles long and 300 to 500 miles wide. Then-11-year-old Imogene Glover later recalled, “The dust was just like face powder. It was so heavy and thick. It wasn't like sand … it was real dark, almost black” [PDF]. It was so thick people could not see hands in front of faces or lightbulbs inches away.

Families fought to keep the dust out of their homes by stuffing wet towels under doors and over windows. But the silt seeped in anyway—through every crack, settling over food, furniture, and clothing—with people covering their faces with rags. The storm lasted for several hours, suffocating cattle in pastures as chickens huddled in coops and birds in flight fell from the skies. Wells became choked with mud. According to the Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, one of the most frightening features of Black Sunday was the static electricity, causing lights and electrical power to stutter.

Residents eventually emerged from dust-buried homes to assess the damage. Farms had vanished and buildings had collapsed under dunes of dirt. The air remained thick, with poor air quality persisting for days, exacerbating health issues and economic damage. Though the estimates of direct fatalities vary, some suggested dust pneumonia took hundreds of lives. The financial damage was impossible to tally. 

From Black Sunday to the Dust Bowl

It’s unclear how the phrase Black Sunday arose, but it was likely coined by journalists around the same time as the public began hearing about the “Dust Bowl.” Struggling to describe the scene in Boise City, Oklahoma, on April 14, 1935, Associated Press reporter Robert E. Geiger wrote that “residents of the southwestern dust bowl marked up another black duster today.” Subsequent press stories cemented Dust Bowl as a phrase synonymous with the dust storms of the 1930s as well as the devastated stretch of the Great Plains.

Black Sunday alone was such a strong storm that lawmakers in Washington, D.C. started paying attention, leading to significant changes in the government’s approach to land management. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, hard at work on the New Deal, prioritized conservation programs. The Soil Conservation Service and several other efforts were established to teach farmers soil-saving practices, including crop rotation and the use of shelterbelts (planting trees or bushes to serve as windbreaks).

But even with federal efforts underway, the Dust Bowl continued over the rest of the decade. 

More than a half-million people were left homeless by farms they couldn’t use or from foreclosures related to the Great Depression. As many as 2.5 million people moved west by 1940. The majority migrated toward California, where many expected a fresh start, but they weren’t welcome: People called them by the pejorative term Okie (regardless of their origin) and treated them with hostility and prejudice.

Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, her famous portrait of Florence Owens Thompson taken in 1936, came to represent the struggle of those displaced by the Dust Bowl. Thompson was one of many who left Oklahoma to relocate in California. Only 32 years old and surrounded by her children, Thompson’s weary, worn expression became a face of the crisis that further influenced government action.

Ultimately, Black Sunday helped kindle widespread understanding of the human-made environmental crisis that had been unfolding for years—and served as a reminder of the cost of ignoring nature’s power. 

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