What was okie

Many who were pushed off of the plains were pulled west because they had relatives who had moved to the coastal areas. And the boosters of California had advertised that the state offered a perfect climate and an abundance of work in the agricultural industry.

Florence Thompson above says she was one of the Okies. She and her family had left Oklahoma in , before the Depression. The 30s made their situation worse. She and the family were following the migrant trail moving from place to place as crops became ready for harvest. We survived, let's put it that way. So for several months in , the Los Angeles Police Department sent deputies to the state lines to turn back migrants who didn't have any money.

Bordering states like Arizona were angry that California was trying to "dump hoboes" back on them. Eventually, the police were returned to Los Angeles, but the migrants kept coming. An inbred, mentally retarded , shit kicker from Oklahoma. Who the hell was that? That's Joe he's a fucking Okie; ignore him. Person from Oklahoma. Usually an ou sooner fan. Loud, obnoxious. This scenario was inaccurate, for the progressive Oklahoma Constitution and Oklahoma's comprehensive banking code made it financially impractical for banks to foreclose on farmers.

Most of the real migrants from Oklahoma were tenant and sharecropper cotton farmers who were forced away from their farm homes not by bankers, but by the farmer-landlords who owned the land. Contrary to public opinion that associates "Okies" and the Dust Bowl, most were from eastern and southern Oklahoma, not from the sparsely populated Dust Bowl counties in northwestern Oklahoma.

The usage of abbreviated terms to indicate state origins is long in practice, and "Okie" is no exception. The term became synonymous with migrants when Ben Reddick, a journalist with the Paso Robles Press in California, saw in migrant camps numerous "old cars with Oklahoma license plates reading 'OK'. From that time, the term applied to migratory workers.

In California passed an "Anti-Okie Law," making it a misdemeanor to "bring or assist in bringing" any indigent person into that state. The law was later declared unconstitutional, but the bias remained. There are those who, like Will Rogers, believed that the migration of "Okies" to California raised the intellectual level of both states.

In many western states "Okie" continues to be used as a derogatory term.