How Father Twomey got sugar-cane workers out of slave quarters

Today’s New York Times story on the inhumane living conditions of workers at a Dominican sugar plantation—and the plantation owner’s Trump White House ties—reminded me how much we need Father Louis J. Twomey, SJ’s visionary spirit today.

In 1953, Father Twomey began a working relationship with Southern Tenant Farmers Union co-founder H.L. Mitchell. From then until Twomey’s death in 1969, the Jesuit was, in Mitchell’s words, “a party to every plan and program [the union] ever worked out with and for the rural poor folks of Louisiana.”1

Perhaps Twomey and Mitchell’s greatest achievement was collaborating in 1967 to launch a Self-Help Housing initiative for sugar-plantation workers. A prototype of modern-day Habitat for Humanity efforts, the initiative, funded by the Farmers Housing Administration, made it possible for sugar-plantation workers in rural Louisiana to own their own homes. News reports indicate that most if not all of the workers were African-American. Some had previously been housed by the plantation owners in former slave quarters.

1

H.L. Mitchell, “The Reverend Louis J. Twomey, SJ (1905–1969),” undated (ca. late October 1969), Twomey Papers, Box 81, Folder 2.