Zoom In: Black Migrant Families
- Chandler Museum
- ChandlerpediaUser6
Many of Chandler’s most prominent Black families, and those who have called Chandler home the longest, arrived here around the same time as the Dust Bowl migrants. Many of their stories are preserved in oral history interviews in the Chandler Museum collection. A survey of those interviews reveal similar stories to those of Dust Bowl migrants - times were hard, work was difficult to find, the entire family piled into a vehicle and headed west.
But there is one key difference - their reasons for leaving. The Dust Bowl migrants were fleeing an environmental disaster. But many of the Black families who arrived in Chandler in the 1930s came from areas of eastern Oklahoma, eastern Texas, and Western Arkansas - areas which were not immediately affected by the Dust Bowl. Instead, Black families came west in order to escape the racism and segregation of the Jim Crow south. They were part of the Great Migration - a vast movement of 6 million Black people from the South to the north and west from the end of World War I into the 1970s.
Carlanthe Turner, whose son, Robert, became one of the first Black students to attend and graduate from Chandler High School, arrived in Chandler in 1939. She and her husband won a lottery to buy a lot on Saragosa Street in the Winn Addition. She and her husband picked cotton on farms south of Chandler. Click the icon below to read a full transcript of a 1985 oral history interview to learn more about Carlanthe’s story:
Josephine Jackson recalled that her parents were forced to mortgage their few head of cattle during the Depression, and would run them off in order to hide them when the collectors came to remove them. She and her husband came west in 1937 looking for work, and found it picking cotton in Chandler.
The Arbuckle family was one of the few Black families who were driven west by the dust. In a March 2006 interview, Willie Arbuckle recalled that his brother was asthmatic, and the Dust Bowl air was making him worse, so the family came west. Click the icon below to read more about the Arbuckle family’s arrival in Chandler:
