Okies

By: Kyle Goni

Okies• Okies are resident or native of Oklahoma• It was applied by the dominant culture groups.• Okie is derived from the state Oklahoma similar

to Texan or Tex for someone from Texas.• In the 1930s in California Okie became the term

that was used for very poor migrants from Oklahoma.

Migration• The Okie migration of the 1930s

brought in over a million newly displaced people; many went to the farm labor jobs.

• By 1950, four million individuals, or one quarter of all people born Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, or Missouri, lived outside the region, generally in the west.

Great Depression• In the mid-1930s, during the Dust

Bowl era, large numbers of farmers fleeing ecological disasters and the Great depression migrated to California mostly among U.S. Route 66.

• Most migrants were from Oklahoma than any other state, a total of 15% of the Oklahoma population left to California.

Treatment of Okies• Okies were highly discriminated,

people would fear them out of the ordinary, and that police officers would check them more then once.

• As workers reached to agricultural industrial land, discrimination was put down on the Okie labor workers.

• As migrants worked, the powerful associated farmers feared that Oklahoma workers would demand better pay and unionize.

• Due to that, they began to demoralize the migrants and humiliate them.

• Many camps for the migrants were located near small towns in which they came face to face with local discrimination.

The start of Okie• Ben Reddick, a free-lance journalist and

later publisher of the Paso Robles Daily Press, was credited with the first using of the term Okie, in the mid-1930s, to identify migrant farm workers.

• Reddick noticed the “OK” abbreviation (for Oklahoma) on many of the migrants license plates and referred to them as “Okie” in his article.

• Californians began calling all migrants by “Okies”, even though many newcomers were not actually Oklahomans.

• The first known usage was from an unpublished private postcard from 1907.