Biography
Dorothy Day was a journalist, organizer, and the co-founder, with Peter Maurin, of the Catholic Worker Movement, the radical pacifist Catholic movement that sustained houses of hospitality, voluntary poverty, and a tradition of nonviolent civil disobedience that has continued for nearly a century. She was first arrested in 1917, at age 19, picketing the White House for women's suffrage with the Silent Sentinels — a sentence she served at the Occoquan Workhouse and described as her political baptism. She was arrested repeatedly across the next six decades.
In the 1950s she was jailed several times for refusing to take shelter during New York's Operation Alert civil-defense drills, an act of conscientious objection she defended as a refusal to lend the cooperation of the city to the rehearsal of nuclear war; her 1957 sentence was thirty days. In the summer of 1973, at age 75, she joined Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers on the picket lines in California's Central Valley in defiance of a court injunction against mass picketing of grape and lettuce growers. She was arrested with other UFW supporters and jailed for ten days at the Fresno County Jail. It was her last imprisonment.
She died in 1980. The Vatican opened her cause for canonization in 2000; she has been declared a Servant of God. Her arrests, taken together, span every major American radical movement of the 20th century — suffrage, IWW solidarity, antiwar, civil defense resistance, and the farm workers — making her one of the most consistently jailed political prisoners in U.S. history.
