On what became known as 'Black Sunday,' a towering wall of dust and topsoil, whipped up by drought and decades of over-farming, rolled across the Southern Plains, blotting out the sun over an area stretching from the Dakotas to Texas. The storm carried an estimated 300 million tons of topsoil and turned midday into pitch darkness, cementing the Dust Bowl in the national memory.
Witnesses described the storm as a black blizzard, a rolling cloud thousands of feet high that advanced faster than a man could run. Static electricity generated by the dust was so intense it shorted out car engines and made barbed-wire fences spark blue in the darkness. People caught outside had to feel their way along fence lines to find their way home.
The disaster was man-made as much as natural. Decades of aggressive plowing had stripped the prairie of the deep-rooted grasses that once anchored its soil, and a severe multi-year drought turned the exposed earth to powder. When high winds arrived, there was nothing left to hold the ground down.
Reporter Robert Geiger, covering the storm, coined the term 'Dust Bowl' in a wire report published days later, and the name stuck to the entire ecological catastrophe of the 1930s. The storm galvanized federal action; it directly influenced the Roosevelt administration's soil conservation programs and the creation of the Soil Conservation Service that same month, reshaping American agricultural policy for generations.