ANSWER Coalition Film Series
Thursday, November 8, 2007, 7:30 pm, $6
“Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beating up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready. And when people are eating the stuff they raise…living in the houses they build…I’ll be there too.” Tom Joad, “Grapes of Wrath”
Driven off their Oklahoma farm during the dust bowl days of the Great Depression, the Joad family loads its belongings into a truck and joins thousands of other dispossessed farmers in the trek to California. The sharecroppers of the time faced mass evictions as wealthy landowners moved to large-scale mechanized farming. The film captures an important period of U.S. history and shows how the workers’ political development was advanced by their collective struggle for survival. The extreme exploitation of Depression-era farm workers has comparisons to the struggle of immigrant workers today. Starring Henry Fonda, 1940, 128 minutes, B&W.