The Southern Tenant Farmer’ Union (STFU) is most often studied through a niche labor lens, occasionally for its biracial organization, or as a precursor to the civil rights coalitions to come a generation later. The papers of this session challenge that narrative, exploring the interconnectedness of the STFU. Beyond a short-lived union and vehicle for economic agency or an example of the region's long history of radicalism, the STFU reflected the complexity of America. Through its diversity in racial, religious, political, cultural, and gender activism, the STFU resonates in today’s continued struggle for social justice. Augmenting the well-studied radical Protestant influences, Ann Mulhearn’s “A Hard Desperate Laughter: Dorothy Day and the STFU,” explores the Catholic activist’s experience with the STFU and how it impacted her developing Catholic Worker Movement. In “The Southern Tenant Farmers Union and the Black Freedom Struggle, 1934-1937,” Matthew Isaacs follows the thread of local and national relationships between the STFU and the CIO, arguing that the mergers and affiliations increased avenues for resistance and developed networks used throughout the civil rights era. Joshua Youngblood’s “Pressing the Struggle: Lee Hays, the STFU, and the Popularization of Labor’s Plight,” explores cultural strategies and impacts of the STFU’s search for relevance in the emerging New Deal society. The final paper looks at the intersectionality of gender and race in the STFU. Cherisse Jones-Branch’s “'Women Always Had More Courage. . .': Rural Black Women and the Southern Tenant Farmers Union,” centers the union’s African American women members who faced both racial and sexual violence as reprisals for their union activities, but whose experiences prepared them for future civil rights battles.