Overview
Dorothea Lange, Children of migrant agricultural workers in California, 1937; courtesy the Library of Congress
The Great Depression and the Dust Bowl
The stock market crash of 1929 and subsequent Great Depression presented another reason for migration within the United States. The economic tragedy of the Depression combined with the environmental disaster known as the Dust Bowl made life especially hard for poor farmers living in the Southern Plains states of Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas, as well as in southern Colorado. Nearly 400,000 of those mostly poor, primarily white migrants made their way to California during the 1930s. Many more continued to arrive in the 1940s to work in war-related industries.
World War II and War-Related Industries
After the U.S. joined the war in 1941, nearly half a million African Americans from the Southern states moved to California as well. Like the earlier group of migrants from farming communities on the southern plains, most of them came to work in war-related industries such as ship construction.