A Hard Desperate Laughter: Dorothy Day and the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union

Dorothy Day, the renowned Catholic social justice activist and founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, made several trips to Arkansas to observe the conditions facing the sharecroppers of the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (STFU). Her experience profoundly impacted her approach to social and racial justice issues and organizing. The resilience, the “hard desperate laughter” of the tenant farmers and their families in the face of desperate poverty and institutionalized inequality, struck a chord in Day that resonated through out the rest of her life and her work. This presentation will examine Day’s religious motivations for seeking out the STFU in Arkansas, her activities while there, and how those experiences transformed her life long commitment to combating what she saw as the irrevocably intertwined evils of modern society – economic inequality and racism.