The Worst Hard Time

I am currently reading The Worst Hard Time, by Timothy Egan.  It is an amazing story.  It covers the wheat boom prior to the Dust Bowl, and then the Dust Bowl and it's aftereffects.  There are so many fascinating facts and anecdotes from the people who lived through that period.  Today it is hard to imagine that in 1930 there were people on the Plains living in sod dugouts and heating them by collecting and burning cow chips, when temperatures could drop 70 degrees in hours and the winds would howl nearly constantly.  There are a ton of stories I'd like to quote, but I came across this one today, and it stunned me:

The sign at the edge of Dalhart (TX)-"BLACK MAN DON'T LET THE SUN GO DOWN ON YOU HERE"-was strictly enforced. In February, a norther came through the High Plains, sending the mercury plummeting to seven degrees. The hazy, arctic air hung on for a week.  When two black men got off the train in Dalhart, hungry and nearly hypothermic, they looked around for something to eat and a place to get warm.  They found a door open in a shed at the train depot.  Inside was some food and shelter from a cold so painful it burned their hands and feet like a blowtorch.

"TWO NEGROES ARRESTED": the Dalhart Texan reported how the two men, aged nineteen and twenty-three, had sniffed around the train station, looking for food.  They were cuffed, locked up in the county jail, and after a week brought out for arraignment before a justice of the peace, Hugh Edwards.  The judge ordered the men to dance.  The men hesitated; this was supposed to be a bond hearing.  The railroad agent said these men were good for nothing but Negro toe-tapping.  The judge smiled; he said he wanted to see it.

           "Tap dance," Edwards told the men.
           "Here?"
           "Yes.  Before the court."
           The men started to dance, forced silly grins on their faces, reluctant. 
            After the tap dance, the judge banged his gavel and ordered
            the men back to jail for two more months.