06/20/2026
Welcome to Teviston, a largely forgotten Black Okie community in the San Joaquin Valley, as photographed by Ernest Lowe from 1960 to 1964.
The story of the Black Okies is considerably different than that of the white Dust Bowl Okies detailed in John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath.” Both groups were made up of former sharecroppers seeking relief from the paralyzing oppression of tenant farming, which had been dubbed “new slavery” by labor activists in the 1930s, but when more than 2 million white sharecroppers fled the Great Plains, black sharecroppers were who were further restricted by Jim Crow legislation were unable to do the same. And, even if they had, they would likely have been in an even worse position as Dust Bowl labor camps were heavily segregated and made up of the same people who’d been their oppressors back home.
Black Okies came west a decade later. By 1946, a large number of African Americans had already come west to work in the defense plants during the war, but it was the sudden mechanization of the farming industry that led black sharecroppers to come west as the tenant farming system collapsed. In total, 40,000 Black Okies settled in California, compared to 400,000 white Okies a decade prior.
Teviston was a community of 90 families who had originated in Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. Many initially took on farm work in the region, picking grapes and cotton, but many transitioned into service jobs in surrounding communities. For the first decade or so of the settlement, they had no access to running water and had to truck it in from the nearby town of Pixley, but in 1959, they saved up $30,000 to build a local well and pipes, but it only brought enough water for 36 families and transport had to continue for years thereafter.
In these Slides, I’m including a statement by the photographer (18-20), where he talks of his experience there and from when he revisited the area in 2015.
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Photos via UC Merced
