Dorothy Day: We Are Urging Revolutionary Change

Introduction

David F. Evans, PhD is an historian, associate dean of Eastern Mennonite Seminary in Harrisonburg, Virginia, and the author of “Damned Whiteness: How White Christian Allies Failed the Black Freedom Movement (University of North Carolina Press, 2025), which focuses on “three white Christian progressives from the 20th century: Dorothy Day, Clarence Jordan, and Ralph Templin.” He discussed his book in an interview with Cassidy Klein in the June 2026 issue of US Catholic, claiming “White Christians lack good role models for racial solidarity.” He explains that his book tells “how, in the history of interracial activism, white allies often failed to stand in solidarity with Black freedom fighters.” 

The questions Evans asks are vital and white people who want to be allies do need to apply those questions even to the people of the past whom we admire the most and the movements to which we dedicate ourselves.   Since I knew Dorothy Day in the last five years of her life, meeting her when I was a 19-year-old dropout and have been an active part of the Catholic Worker movement since that time, I take special interest in his assessment of her. 

Dorothy Day (1897 –1980) co-founded the Catholic Worker movement along with Peter Maurin that continues from 1933 to today, with more than 200 autonomous communities around the world.  A writer and journalist by trade, Day and Maurin founded The Catholic Worker newspaper, still published seven times a year.

While Evans acknowledges that Dorothy Day was a “prolific writer” and admits that her work is “accessible to the public through edited volumes and the online Catholic Worker archives,” it appears that his judgement of her is based on secondary sources and some preconceived assumptions. 

May Day 1933 – An “Anticommunist Crusade”?

Evans has a unique understanding of the events around the origins of the Catholic Worker movement that Day founded with Peter Maurin and the distribution of the first issue of The Catholic Worker newspaper at a May Day rally in New York’s Union Square in 1933.

While never a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, Day was certainly sympathetic to socialism. As a young journalist, Day wrote for Communist and Socialist periodicals and often took to the streets in support of their causes.

When Day joined the Catholic Church in 1927, she credited her radical atheist comrades for her conversion. “I have said, sometimes flippantly,” Day wrote in her 1938 memoir, “From Union Square to Rome”, “that the mass of bourgeois smug Christians who denied Christ in His poor made me turn to the Communists, and it was the Communists and working with them that made me turn to God.” 

The purpose of The Catholic Worker, Day explained in that first issue, was “to call their attention to the fact that the Catholic Church has a social program—to let them know that there are men of God who are working not only for their spiritual, but for their material welfare… It’s time there was a Catholic paper printed for the unemployed. The fundamental aim of most radical sheets is the conversion of its readers to radicalism and atheism. Is it not possible to be radical and not atheist? Is it not possible to protest, to expose, to complain, to point out abuses and demand reforms without desiring the overthrow of religion?” 

Evans takes note of the significance of Day’s choice of time and place to launch this newspaper on May 1, International Workers’ Day in Union Square, a hotbed of labor agitation, and believes that his conclusion is the obvious one. “If you were in my class,” Evans said in an April 23 address that he gave at Fordham University, “I’d ask you what’s significant about May 1, right?” Evans’ take on it: “By naming her paper The Catholic Worker and issuing it on May Day, she placed her movement in direct competition to the Communist Party. And as you see here from the very beginning, she made clear that the purpose of the paper is to combat communism and atheism.” 

That the original purpose of The Catholic Worker was “to combat communism and atheism,” so clear to Evans today, was not evident to Day’s and Maurin’s contemporaries or to subsequent historians. A more common understanding has been that Day was not trying to convince or convert anyone to what she saw as the truths of the Catholic faith so much as to explain her perspectives. In that first issue, if she is to be believed, her purpose was to assure believers that they could pursue justice without abandoning faith, to assure Catholics, especially the Catholic immigrant laborers, that there was support for their struggles in church teachings. It was also to assure her former comrades on the Left of her continuing solidarity, to assure them that there were believers, some Catholics included, working beside them.

In his forward to the 2006 reissue of “From Union Square to Rome”, Robert Ellsberg, editor of Day’s writings, noted that Day was “never entirely pleased about the title of this book. It suggested a chasm between the world of radical agitation- Union Square- and the world of faith, whereas in fact Day’s life would bridge these worlds. Nothing symbolized this so clearly as the decision to launch The Catholic Worker on May 1, 1933, at a Communist rally in Union Square.” Where Evans perceives the launching of The Catholic Worker on May Day as a weapon in Day’s “campaign against communism,” Ellsberg, who knew Day well, sees proof that her life represented a bridge across the chasm between radical agitation and faith.

In Evans’ estimation, The Catholic Worker newspaper was a tactic in an “anticommunist crusade” and that Day “believed that the newspaper was taking away from them one of the weapons communists have been using against the church, namely the charge that it is allied with capitalism and an enemy of the worker.” Day herself often leveled this same charge against the Church: “I was just as much against capitalism and imperialism as ever, and here I was going over to the opposition, because of course the Church was lined up with property, with the wealthy, with the state, with capitalism, with all the forces of reaction,” she wrote about her conversion in her 1952 autobiography, “The Long Loneliness”.  “This I had been taught to think and this I still think to a great extent.”

It is known that Peter Maurin was unhappy with that first issue of The Catholic Worker in May, 1933, and that after seeing the proofs from the printer he actually skipped town and missed the rally in Union Square. Day explained that Maurin had expected that the paper would be publishing his own “Easy Essays” exclusively and was disappointed to see articles in it written by Day and by others. “Everybody’s paper is nobody’s paper” is how Day reported Maurin’s comment as he left. Evans widens his narration of the Catholic Worker’s origins with a conflicting version of Maurin’s words going out the door: “It’s a paper for everyone. And everyone’s paper is no one’s paper.” In this retelling, the gist of Maurin’s complaint shifts from the authorship of the paper to its intended audience. Evans goes on that Maurin “verbalized his ‘great sadness’ over features that included Black concerns in the paper” and had stated “that race concerns were a distraction.” Maurin, according to Evans, “dismissed (Day’s) hatred of racial prejudice.” 

Such sentiments on Maurin’s part were not recorded by Day or Maurin or their contemporaries, nor have they been noted by historians, before now. Evans cites Nancy L. Roberts and her book, “Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker”, as his source for this information. Roberts, however, relays Maurin’s quote as Day reported it and supports Day’s explanation of his dissatisfaction: “What especially disturbed Maurin,” Roberts wrote, “was the paper’s emphasis on strikes, wages, and labor conditions— instead of on his solution of radical Christian personalism.” In any case, in a few weeks Maurin returned to The Catholic Worker, accepting, in his words, that “Man proposes, woman disposes.”

Whose “Trojan Horse” Was Dorothy Day?

Evans notes that Mike Gold, one of Day’s Leftist friends from before her conversion, wrote an editorial in the Communist Daily Worker newspaper calling the Catholic Worker movement “a Trojan horse for the Vatican in the progressive movement, a stalking horse, window dressing.” “Day was not pleased with Gold’s characterization,” Evans says, “but there was merit in his claim that the movement endeavored to infiltrate communist gatherings to gain converts to Catholicism.” Gold suspected something sneaky, a “Trojan horse” surreptitiously infiltrating the party for the purpose of its destruction. 93 years later Evans contends, to the contrary, that Day had openly declared such intentions “from the very beginning.”

Parallel with Gold’s and Evans’ apprehensions over Day planting Vatican propaganda among the communists as part of a “crusade against communism,” a more common suspicion was that The Catholic Worker was infiltrating Catholicism with communist propaganda. Director of the FBI J. Edgar Hoover had his eye on Day in those days and reported in her declassified FBI file: “Dorothy Day is a very erratic and irresponsible person. She has engaged in activities which strongly suggest that she is consciously or unconsciously being used by communist groups.” He also relayed the suspicion that “Dorothy Day is a Russian who came to the United States and visited Chicago, Illinois, in the spring of 1939, where she attempted to interest people in Communist activities.” In 1937, popular “radio priest” Father Charles Coughlin, whose influence has been compared with that of Bishop Robert Barron today, warned his audience: “despite all references to the saints, the Popes, and the encyclicals, its [The Catholic Worker’s] attitude on the Spanish question was enough to make one wonder if the thing were not downright Communism camouflaged in Catholic paint.”

This second delusion is no better informed than Evans’ or Gold’s, but there is more evidence to back it up – while Day did not encourage Catholics to join the Communist Party, she did openly and consistently encourage Catholics to behave more like the communists.

In her 1964 eulogy for her friend Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, secretary general of the Communist Party USA, Day held up this Marxist atheist as an example for Catholics to follow. The Ecumenical Council had stressed “this is the age of the laity,” she said, and Gurley Flynn “always did what the laity is nowadays urged to do. She felt a responsibility to do all in her power in defense of the poor, to protect them against injustice and destitution.” 

In her column in March, 1954, Day lamented, “The great scandal of the age is that those without the sacraments are so often superior in charity, courage, even laying down their lives for their brothers, to the ‘practicing Catholic’ who partakes of the Sacraments of Penance and Holy Eucharist and then stands by while his brother is exploited, starved, beaten, and goes on living his bourgeois life, his whole work being to maintain ‘his standard of living,’ and neglecting the one thing needful, love of God and brother.”

While Day did reject communism when she joined the Catholic Church, this did not make her anticommunist. In 1949, she wrote “I can say with warmth that I loved the people I worked with and learned much from them. They helped me to find God in His poor, in His abandoned ones, as I had not found Him in Christian churches… My radical associates were the ones who were in the forefront of the struggle for a better social order where there would not be so many poor.” 

In the face of genuine anticommunist campaigns, Day and the Catholic Worker consistently proved their solidarity. In 1949, to the consternation of many of her readers, Day wrote a letter of protest and support for eleven Communists convicted under the Smith Act who were denied bail. One year later, in 1956, when the FBI seized the editorial offices and mailing list of the Daily Worker, Day responded: “We at the Catholic Worker express our sympathy to The Daily Worker in the eviction they have suffered even though their beliefs are contrary to our own.” The Catholic Worker’s offer to share its offices and mailing list to their comrades at The Daily Worker was not accepted.

In a later “red scare,” in 1971, nine years before her death, Day again showed her solidarity when Angela Davis, a Black Communist activist and academic, who was on trial on trumped murder charges. “Angela Davis is a Communist,” Day wrote in her column in The Catholic Worker, “in this case and it is a name for vilification nowadays, though the early Christians, working for the common good became communists in a very literal sense.” Day did not feel any need to convert Davis to the Catholic Church.  “Since Christ is our brother,” she explained, “Angela Davis is our sister, and we love and esteem her as such.”

“Of course we should all study Marxism,” Day said in the same column. “Instead of thinking always of the dangers of such knowledge of a philosophy and economic theory which has dominated today the thinking of much of the world.”

“Charity,” Day insisted, “was a word to choke over. Who wanted charity? And it was not just human pride but a strong sense of man’s dignity and worth, and what was due to him in justice, that made me resent, rather than feel proud of so mighty a sum total of Catholic institutions.”

Dorothy Day

Charity vs. Solidarity

After many years in the Catholic Worker movement, it is disconcerting to hear someone say that “charity” is at the heart of the Catholic Worker and that the “charity paradigm” was the “sole tool” that Day “employed to address poverty and racism.” As Evans told US Catholic, “Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin and the Catholic Worker movement saw that the way to engage in positive Christian practice as we have done for centuries is to live into charity.” 

Evans takes care not to dismiss the value of charity altogether, “because charity is so vitally important to care for people, to give to people who don’t have what they need, especially in emergencies and crises.” Day in real life, in real time, however, had far less tolerance for charity than does Evans. She might agree with his take on charity only in so far as he notes, “when those power imbalances remain indefinitely unless the structure changes, charity allows for those systems of power to continue.” 

“Charity,” Day insisted, “was a word to choke over. Who wanted charity? And it was not just human pride but a strong sense of man’s dignity and worth, and what was due to him in justice, that made me resent, rather than feel proud of so mighty a sum total of Catholic institutions.” “Where were the saints to try to change the social order, not just to minister to the slaves but to do away with slavery?” was a question that haunted Day from her youth.

On the occasions where Day did invoke the word “charity” without dismissing it, she was referring to it as one of the three theological virtues, along with faith and hope, something quite different from the charity Evans says was Day’s paradigm and “sole tool”. “Charity means love,” according to Day, and “Love presupposes justice. In the scriptures the just man is the holy man, the holy man is the whole man, the man of integrity, the integrated man, the man who works and lives by the sweat of his brow, not on someone else’s sweat, not on credit cards, not by cheating and being cheated, and repaying the cheaters by cheating again.”

Largely avoiding the word “charity,” Day spoke in terms of “hospitality” and “Works of Mercy.” “We consider the spiritual and corporal Works of Mercy and the following of Christ to be the best revolutionary technique and a means for changing the social order rather than perpetuating it. Did not the thousands of monasteries, with their hospitality, change the entire social pattern of their day?” she asked.  

“The implications of the gospel teaching of the works of mercy,” Day insisted, “lead us into conflict with the powers of this world. Our love of God is a consuming fire.”

Except on the surface, charity and hospitality have little in common. Unlike many religious based charities, the Catholic Worker is no more interested in converting the unhoused poor than they are in bringing communists into the Church. The poor, Day and Maurin insisted, are Christ among us, and what would be the point of converting Christ? At the Catholic Worker, unlike the soup kitchens of the Salvation Army, the rescue missions, etc., there are no sermons preached, no altar calls. Few Catholic Worker houses of hospitality have formal relations with a parish or diocese and few are incorporated nonprofits.  Charities have clients, Catholic Worker houses have guests.

Charities are more protective of their donor bases than Catholic Worker houses usually are and few charities dare to speak out on controversial issues. In 1934, Catholic Workers began picketing the German consulate in New York protesting policies of the new fascist regime in Germany. A year later, Catholic Workers joined communists picketing the Bremen, a German ship flying the nazi flag in New York harbor. In 1942, after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States declared war, The Catholic Worker lost more than 70,000 subscribers and many houses of hospitality were forced to close when the headline of the paper read “We Continue Our Christian Pacifist Stand.” After president of North Vietnam Ho Chi Mihn died in 1969, Day praised him in the pages of the paper as “a man of vision, as a patriot, a rebel against foreign invaders.” Charities don’t do that.

Agreement with the Catholic Right?

Evans aligns Day with reactionary or socially clueless clergy, claiming that she “supported the white Catholic priests who worked against Black organizing in favor of efforts that celebrated white oversight.” Yet in her own life and words, Day did not exhibit much patience with such priests: “There was plenty of charity but too little justice,” she complained in The Long Loneliness, citing “the scandal of businesslike priests, of collective wealth, the lack of a sense of responsibility for the poor, the worker, the Negro, the Mexican, the Filipino, and even the oppression of these, and the consenting to the oppression of them by our industrialist-capitalist order—these made me feel often that priests were more like Cain than Abel… ‘The worst enemies would be those of our own household,’ Christ had warned us.”

Evans is not alone in his presentation of Dorothy Day, that her conversion to Catholicism was a total fracture, a clean break from her Leftist past, abandoning the agitator and revolutionist that she was in her youth to become a docile, content daughter of the Church. In this portrayal, post-conversion Day was an obedient Church lady dispensing charity, a remorseful penitent who had abandoned her radicalism along with her other sins when she became a Catholic, with no other wish than to attract others to the faith.  A take like his, though, is more common among conservative establishment type Catholics than it is on the secular Left. While Evans does not indicate his dependence on these sources on the Catholic Right, he is unfailing in accepting their definitions of Day, even as they contradict Day’s own explanations of her beliefs and her motives.

The Dorothy Day so beloved by Bishop Robert Barron (who also admires Donald Trump) for example, went to Mass every day, but otherwise she has little in common with the historical Dorothy Day, the real one, the one who held “that nonviolent resistance is the only sane solution, and that we have to continue to make our voice heard until we are finally silenced–and even then, in jail or concentration camp, to express ourselves.”

Cardinal John O’Connor, the archbishop of New York who started the process toward Day’s canonization in 1997, explained in a 2000 Catholic New York article that “Dorothy Day often seemed friendly to political groups hostile to the Church, for example, communists, socialists, and anarchists.” But to understand Day, he insisted, “it is necessary to divide her political stances in two spheres: pre- and post-conversion.” More recently, on the conservative Catholic Answers Focus in August 2021, theologian and Catholic Worker Larry Chapp likewise defends Day from such sordid associations, “once she became Catholic, she completely disavowed her relationships that she had with Marxists and she opposed socialism.” Cardinal Francis George of Chicago insisted that “Dorothy Day did not turn her criticism of the social order on the church.” 

Evans’ contention that Day and Maurin founded the Catholic Worker for the sole purpose of gaining converts to Catholicism agrees with Colin Miller, theologian and Catholic Worker who in his 2024 book, “We Are Only Saved Together”, which insists that “The Catholic Worker has no other vision for society than simply for Catholics to be Catholics, to invite others to be Catholics, and so to create a Catholic social order. Its vision for society is for it to be the Church.” 

“Damned Whiteness” shows the extent to which the historical Dorothy Day has been eclipsed by a popular and less provoking incarnation, even beyond the Catholic community. “We have seldom been given the saints as they really were, as they affected the lives of their times — unless it is in their own writings” Day wrote. “But instead of given that strong meat, we are too generally given the pap of hagiography.” Evans and the Catholic revisionists who appear to inform him both recoil from the strong meat of Day’s own writings in favor of the pap of hagiography, more malleable to their (very different) ends. 

Voluntary Poverty vs. Embourgeoisement

Along with charity, “the heart of the Catholic Worker movement was voluntary poverty,” according to Evans. He considers voluntary poverty and finds it wanting, but without consideration for what Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker actually mean by the term. 

“Dorothy Day is saying we all need to commit to voluntary poverty,” Evans tells US Catholic. “In the book, I quote James Farmer, who says something like, I didn’t volunteer to be poor the first time. It’s different when you are already poor to be asked to commit to poverty.” Day certainly shared Farmer’s apprehensions: “It is hard to write about poverty. We live in a slum neighborhood that is becoming ever more crowded with Puerto Ricans who are doubling up in unspeakably filthy, dark, crowded tenements on the lower east side and in Harlem, who have the lowest wages in the city, who do the hardest work, who are little and undernourished from generations of privation and exploitation by us,” she wrote, and “it is hard to write about poverty when a visitor tells you of how he and his family all lived in a basement room and did sweat shop work at night to make ends meet, and how the landlord came in and belabored them for not paying his exorbitant rent.”

Llewellyn Scott, Black activist and founder of the first Catholic Worker house in Washington, DC, wrote in his 1942 memoir, “Our Story”, about meeting Day in 1935: 

“When I met her, I was greatly impressed by her manner and appearance; which was most unassuming. She told me much of the beginning of the movement. She spoke of being voluntarily poor and the mystical body of Christ. This was also new and strange to me, but as she spoke my heart seemed to jump and all of a sudden I could see the thing I wanted to do was much easier than I had thought. I did not need several hundreds of dollars in new equipment, nor did I need a modern large building. How easy and simple it was now, almost in my grasp.

Miss Day spoke of the difference between poverty and destitution. I was soon sold on the idea, and after our talk she said ‘Here is five dollars, it is all that I have; take this, as I want to be the first to give you a donation on your new house that you will start.’

I had never been able to see anything good in poverty before, but it was all different after my talk with Miss Day. I seemed to see with a fervent and different set of eyes. What I had thought of as awful poverty, was now dire destitution, and poverty was just being poor, but it could be orderly, clean and good. I began to think now that our Lord had always been poor and was found with poor people and had carried it all with dignity.”

Voluntary poverty in Evans’ estimation, like his take on charity, does not challenge power inequalities and it leaves systems of oppression intact.  Day and Maurin, as Saints Francis and Benedict before them, however, saw voluntary poverty as a protest against unjust systems. For these saints, voluntary poverty is resistance, not acquiescence.  “Voluntary poverty,” Day quoted Maurin, “is the answer. Through voluntary poverty others will be induced to help his brothers. We cannot see our brother in need without stripping ourselves. It is the only way we have of showing our love.” 

Day insisted that “one way to keep poor of course is not to accept money which is the result of defrauding the poor.” Refusing the fruits of exploitation certainly limits one’s earning potential in a capitalist economy, and there are very few wealthy estates not built on the backs of others. On the occasion where an individual raised in poverty does amass personal wealth, “those power imbalances remain indefinitely unless the structure changes,” and even when the newly rich give generously, such “charity allows for those systems of power to continue.”

In the May, 1943 issue of The Catholic Worker, Day asked, 

“Why do we write about cooperatives, credit unions, mutual aid? Because when we see what Christianity is, when we see the beauty of our faith–when we have gone through something analogous to a conversion, we see all things new, as St. Paul says. We look upon our work, our lives, and we say, ‘How do these things square with Christian teaching? Can we go on making money at the expense of our brother? Can we be profiteers, can we work on Wall Street? Can we go in for advertising which sets up false standards, which perverts the people, which fills their minds with meretricious desires, making the good sweet life of the Christian unpalatable?’ If we wish to follow Christ, we will be workers like Jesus, like St. Joseph, like St. Paul. We will think of the dignity of labor, we will respect the worker, will bear our share of responsibility toward making that new social order wherein justice dwelleth, where people will have that certain amount of goods which St. Thomas says is necessary to lead a good life.”

Evans is suspicious of voluntary poverty and says “by enshrining poverty in virtue, Catholic Worker houses of hospitality represented a countermovement to the progressive era ideal of upward mobility.” The alternative to voluntary poverty, Evans says, is Black embourgeoisement, which he claims “would render charity unnecessary.”  Embourgeoisement, generally defined as “the process by which the values, ideas and lifestyles of the bourgeoisie or middle class are adopted by non-bourgeois groups” (Wikipedia), is usually regarded as a problem rather than a solution by radicals. In a paper published by the International Social Science and Humanities Studies in 2025, Black sociologist Paul C. Mocombe regards Black embourgeoisement as “itself a form of White supremacy.”

Voluntary poverty, Day believed, is the remedy to destitution. It recognizes that the values, ideas and lifestyles of the bourgeoisie or middle class and the progressive era ideal of upward mobility are lethal to the individual soul and destructive of community. From Day’s April 1953, column, “I am sure that God did not intend that there be so many poor. The class structure is of our making and our consent, not His. It is the way we have arranged it, and it is up to us to change it. So we are urging revolutionary change.” Embourgeoisement urges something less.

Communities struggling for the fruits of their labor and the share of resources that they have been deprived of are consistent with voluntary poverty. Day always supported workers’ struggles for their rights. At 73 years old, she was arrested with striking farmworkers in California and spent 11 days in jail with them. Embourgeoisement, on the other hand, is incompatible with solidarity. The damage wrought to the environment by “upward mobility” and wars caused by the values, ideas and lifestyles of the bourgeoisie are more evident and dire by the day. If embourgeoisement does render charity unnecessary one day, it will be because it leaves no survivors.

Unable to Acknowledge Black Wisdom?

Evans told US Catholic that Day, along with Jordan and Templin, “are responding to their environment that is coded very white because of segregation and their inability to acknowledge the wisdom and skill of Black organizers, Black communities, and Black people. It leaves them impoverished in and trapped in a white world that cannot imagine freedom for everyone”.

Day is not above criticism, but when taken into account, her own words over the years document at least to some extent an ability to acknowledge the wisdom and skill of Black organizers, Black communities, and Black people. Far from being impoverished and trapped, Day’s imagination concerning freedom for everyone was more fertile than Evans grants.

In her 1971 column, Day referred to Angela Davis in terms that pious Catholics usually reserve for Mary, mother of Jesus, “All generations shall call her blessed.” “Angela Davis,” Day said, “is a beautiful young woman, a graduate of Brandeis University, and at a time when jobs even in the academic field were scarce, risked her livelihood by openly stating her faith in the kind of social order which she thought would bring justice and a better life for her Black brothers and sisters.”

While it has been said that Day insisted that she did not want to be called a saint, she did not hesitate to apply that title to the popular comedian and Black activist Dick Gregory, whom she called “a brave and courageous spirit” and “a saint of our times.”

Day’s regard for “the wisdom and skill” of Julius Nyerere, the socialist president of Tanzania, was particularly effusive. “To me [ Nyerere’s] Arusha Declaration sounds like Peter Maurin’s ideas incarnate,” she said.

Did Dorothy Day Fail?

Evans sees Day foremost as a proselytizer whose “primary cause was to win people from the Communist Party to Catholicism.” The entire purpose of the Catholic Worker movement, its newspaper, soup lines, farms, the houses of hospitality, all of it, in Evans’ estimation, was an “evangelistic effort” to convert the masses to the Catholic Church and nothing more. She “was content to use the stories of Black people in the Catholic Worker as anticommunist propaganda” he says, “largely a ploy to compete with the Communist Party rather than a way to join in solidarity.” Those stories, in Evans’ judgement, showed that “her focus (was) solely on racial animus toward Black laborers, and not on the systemic conditions that sustained it.” 

The key question Evans asks about Dorothy Day is, did she fail as an ally to the Black freedom movement? “While Day was an outspoken critic of racist acts,” Evans grants, “her primary cause was to win people from the Communist Party to Catholicism, not to combat racism.” At any rate, Evans doesn’t think that Day’s antiracism ploy was long-lived. After 1957, Evans claims, Day failed altogether “to confront racial injustices.” Evans credited the newspaper Day cofounded with sticking with it for a few more years: “Interestingly,” he says, “the highest number of articles opposing anti-Black discrimination appeared (in The Catholic Worker) in the first year: none appeared after 1966.” The dates 1957 and 1966 seem arbitrarily chosen and they severely restrict the margins of his research. Had he included some of Day’s most impassioned statements of solidarity with Black freedom fighters in the last decades of her life, Evans may have reached different conclusions.

It may be true, though, that by volume there were more articles opposing anti-Black discrimination in The Catholic Worker in 1933 than in succeeding years. In subsequent issues, The Catholic Worker was one of the first non-Jewish papers in the U.S. to protest the persecution of the Jews under the Nazi regime that had just come into power in Germany. Catholic Workers picketed the German consulate and promoted conscientious objection to military service. The Catholic Worker immediately denounced the bombing of Hiroshima and promoted direct action against the buildup of nuclear weapons and civil defense drills and organized some of the first protests when the U.S. went to war in Vietnam. What Evans interprets as waning interest in racial injustice on the part of Day and the movement might also indicate a growing awareness of and resistance to what Martin Luther King would identify in 1967 as “the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism.” 

If one accepts Evans’ premise that Day’s “primary cause” was making converts to Catholicism as true and that she actually believed and acted upon the preposterous notion that “racism was an ecclesial issue that would cease when workers embraced Catholicism,” to the exclusion of considering systemic causes and remedies, the question is moot. One cannot fail as an ally when one has only been posing as an ally in the first place. Day, as Evans presents her, failed before she began. 

“The question is of utmost importance,” Evans says in the introduction to his book, “especially for Catholics adjudicating Day’s candidacy for sainthood, and of no less importance to millions of Protestants who view Day as an inspiration.” As one who knew Dorothy Day and who has been active in the movement that she cofounded my whole adult life, I agree. Even today, the Catholic Worker remains a movement of mostly white people.  While a more thorough and frank critique of Day and the movement through the lens of racial justice could possibly be painful, it would certainly be helpful.

Evans cites Martin Luther King’s insistence that “we will have to rise up and protest,” and that reconciliation requires, in Evans’s words, “putting faith into action by working against systems and institutions that restricted Black self-determination” and the great Black freedom fighter Frederick Douglass, who proclaimed in the previous century: “This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle.” Amen.

“On the other side of the color line,” Evans says, referring to Day and to Clarence Jordan and Ralph Templin and the movements they inspired, “white Christian allies often ignored the need to adopt institutional or systemic reform methods that might have allowed for the interracial fellowship that they envisioned. Their interracial organizations generally avoided conflict with existing institutions, churches, neighborhoods, local laws and federal policies so that they could pursue utopian visions of Christian community without publicly challenging racial rules or regulations.”

The Catholic Worker is a diverse, decentralized network of communities and individuals, and unfortunately, Evans’ critique may apply to some communities. The Catholic Worker needs such criticism today. For all our faults, though, it cannot be said of Dorothy Day or of the Catholic Worker movement that we have generally avoided conflict with church or with state, with “local laws and federal policies,” so that we might “pursue utopian visions of community.” Evans’ criticism applies in so far as Catholic Workers have ignored or rejected Day’s imperative “we need to overthrow this rotten, decadent, putrid industrial capitalist system” and where we have lost the vision and have become, as she warned we might, “merely philanthropists, doling out palliatives.”

“Who Should My Students Read?”

I am disappointed in “Damned Whiteness” and in David F. Evans not for the criticism of Dorothy Day, but rather for overlooking her authentic self as expressed in her writing and work and attacking instead the low hanging fruit of the pious and inoffensive church lady certain churchmen and academics have constructed in her place.

In his “US Catholic” interview, Evans explains his search for resources to help his students at Eastern Mennonite Seminary, “a predominantly white institution, combat injustice.” “So I asked my colleagues, who do you read? Who should my students read?” 

Evans might start by disregarding his own preconceptions and the pious fabrications of her revisionists and actually read Day’s own words. If David F. Evans can’t find his way to recommend his students read Dorothy Day, I hope that they find her by another way.