The Great Depression changed the lives of people who lived and farmed on the Great Plains and in turn, changed America. The government programs that helped them to live through the 1930s changed the future of agriculture forever. Weather touched every part of life in the "Dirty 30s": dust, insects, summer heat and winter cold. York County farm families didn't have heat, light or indoor bathrooms like people who lived in town.
"In the Depression, the men could not get jobs, and especially the black men," Bridgeforth says. "Here was my father with a degree in chemistry, and he could not get a job."
Bridgeforth's father was humiliated, she says. He fell apart, so her mother took what work she could find as a live-in domestic worker. Bridgeforth, who was in grade school, was boarded out.
"She told me that this is the way it has to be," Bridgeforth says. "So we either do it and survive, or don't do it and don't survive."
