 He decided to go to New York and study playwrighting himself.Armed with a letter of introduction from Claude Williams and Willard Uphaus, Hays became a resident at a student program at New York City's progressive Judson Memorial Church.There, he and a friend, Alan Hacker, a photojournalist, raised funds to make a documentary film about the plight of Southern sharecroppers and about efforts at Highlander and elsewhere to organize the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (STFU), one of the first racially integrated labor unions in the United States.