03/14/2022
📅 Mark your calendars and join us for our 2021 Reed Fink Award researcher presentation! The 2021 award recipient, Mary Bathory Vidaver, will be presenting virtually via Vimeo.
👀 Watch this space for a link to the livestream closer to April 5th!
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In the 1950s, Franz Daniel, the one-time seminarian and long-time labor leader in the U. S. South, looked back on the movement's victories and failures in the region. Writing to Lucy Randolph Mason, church lady and union publicist in Atlanta, he noted, "the spiritual side of the labor movement is every bit as important as the economic. And it's the part that is so easy to lose sight of." For him and for others, Miss Lucy served as a touchstone of that insight, restoring his commitment and motivation by her constant faith and calm presence in the often vitriolic and violent storm that accompanied the labor movement's battles for recognition. Using materials drawn from Southern Labor Archives, supplemented by other primary source material, this presentation explores the various uses by which individuals and the larger labor movement employed religion and the spiritual side.
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Mary Bathory Vidaver is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Mississippi, a 2021 Social Science Research Council Religion, Spirituality, and Democratic Renewal Fellow, and the 2021 recipient of the Reed-Fink Award for Southern Labor History. Her dissertation project, for which the award has provided research funding, examines how a socially-focused religiosity meshed seamlessly with a commitment to Jeffersonian democracy and broad constructions of civil rights to inspire social activism across multiple generations of white Southerners and across diverse movements in an effort to redeem the region they loved from the sins of both the Old and the New South.
