Kevin Kukel of San Francisco looks over a display inside a historic recreational building at Weedpatch Camp during the Dust Bowl Days festival in Bakersfield in 2019. The camp housed people who ...

OKLAHOMA CITY -- Fleeing the Great Depression and a drought unprecedented in American history, a vast wave of Oklahomans and Texans dubbed "Okies" loaded everything they could onto crowded vehicles ...

The California Legislature did pass a law in the 1930s to ban poor Okies and others (“Steinbeck a reminder about discrimination against Okies," Feb. 27).

Migrant laborer Francisco Velasquez, 22, watches as almonds are loaded into a trailer in Hilmar. For some farmworkers, ‘agriculture is a starting point. Parents pick and send their kids to school and ...

Benjamin Beavers watches his children play in front of their house in Teviston in 1961. A collection of photographs by Ernie Lowe will be shown in a new exhibit that opens from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m. Friday ...

Remember the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath, in which John Steinbeck wrote of the plight of the “Okies,” who were forced off their lands in Oklahoma during the Great Depression and ...

Forced by the drought of 1936 to abandon their farm, this Oklahoma family headed to California. At the time of this photograph, they were within a day's travel of their destination: Bakersfield, Calif ...

Re “The Black Okies,” (Aug. 25-27): These stories by Mark Arax about the pilgrimage of a great people from Oklahoma to a hard, rural setting in the middle of California are the finest examples of ...

They flooded into California fleeing poverty in their homeland. The public denigrated them as dirty and crime-prone — a threat to the good life. Authorities harassed the newcomers out of city limits, ...