by Paul Ortiz
THE RISE OF THE FARMWORKER MOVEMENT
The experiences of most Brown and Black workers in American history do not square with the idea of the United States as a middle-class republic. Martin Luther King Jr. dismantled the myth of universal upward mobility in his final book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? King believed that the idea of the “middle-class Utopia” derailed comprehensive efforts to end poverty.36 If US society was based on “fair play,” as so many alleged and assumed, then obviously the poor only had themselves to blame for their poverty. In reality, however, the hardest-working members of the United States were consistently the poorest and least advantaged. King writes: “We must honestly admit that capitalism has often left a gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty [and] has created conditions permitting necessities to be taken from the many to give luxuries to the few, and has encouraged smallhearted men to become cold and conscienceless so that, like Dives before Lazarus, they are unmoved by suffering, poverty-stricken humanity.”37
A 1969 study of working-class Mexican American communities in the Southwest strongly echoed King’s observation on the intersections of class and race inequalities. Ernesto Galarza and his colleagues wrote: “As percentages of [the] poor, brown and black [populations] hold about equal shares of not having.”38 Throughout the Sunbelt, agribusiness depended on the federal government to provide them with a variety of “guest worker” programs that would produce a labor force unable to challenge the authority of their employers.39 As a result, Galarza finds, “There is everywhere a large number of politically and culturally immobilized residents. . . . Their separation from the functions of citizenship was total.”40 In districts containing such working families, the result was unpaved streets, impoverished schools, and lack of running water. “The noncitizen, whether he is a registered alien or a bracero or an illegal, can be nothing but a petitioner for services,” writes Galarza.41
And yet, there was even then a silent revolution brewing in the region’s barrios and agricultural valleys. In 1952, César Chávez, a WWII veteran and the son of migrant farmworkers, took a job in San Jose, California, as an organizer with the Community Service Organization.42 Along with a cohort of remarkable activists that included Dolores Huerta and Gilbert Padilla, Chávez learned the skills of community organizing. A decade later, the group began organizing a labor union, and formed the National Farm Workers Association. The philosophy of the NFWA was rooted in asking new members to contribute whatever they had—dues, spare food, labor—to keep the organization running. Instead of dictating the answers from above, NFWA organizers urged workers to develop their own solutions to problems. The idea was to show people that they can begin to change their lives for the better. No problem was too big or too small to tackle: job discrimination, police harassment, difficulties getting loans—Huerta, Chávez, and a growing cadre of organizers worked with the farmworkers to solve these dilemmas. Bureaucrats at state employment offices were surprised when campesinos began demanding an end to discriminatory hiring practices. In the process, farmworkers began to discover that they had the ability to change their lives. When an action failed, members regrouped to talk to each other about what went wrong, and how to do better the next time.
Fred Ross, the founder of the Community Service Organization and Chávez’s mentor in the pre-NFWA days, recalled that Chávez was adept at forming relationships of trust and encouraging people to develop their own leadership abilities:
The Service Center, with César in command, was much more than your routine problem clinic; it was a sovereign restorative of human dignity and a means of drawing the people, whose lifestyle had been one of being pushed around by the authorities without a peep[. They] soon learned to stand their ground, speak out, and get what they came after. In the agony of forcing themselves to do this, they suffered a sea change: they got organized.43
The NFWA’s grassroots organizing style required months of house meetings, countless conversations, and arguments to unfold. The rewards were slow in coming. One month the group would sign up dozens of new members. The next month the new members quit. NFWA organizers never lost faith in the mission. Chávez recalled, “Of every hundred workers I talked to, one would say, ‘It’s time [to form a union].’ Everybody said no one could organize farmworkers, that it couldn’t be done. But we got a group of forty or fifty, and one by one, that’s how we started.”44 After three years of these intensive face-to-face meetings the NFWA grew to twelve hundred members.
The federal Bracero Program ended in 1964. Hundreds of Filipino farmworkers, members of the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), called a grape strike in California’s Coachella Valley in the first week of September 1965. Picking grapes several miles away from the strike’s epicenter, Philip Vera Cruz, a Filipino farmworker, was electrified by the news.45 Vera Cruz had come to the United States in 1926 hoping to become a lawyer. Instead, he had joined the rest of the Manong generation of male Filipino migrants—the first wave of Filipino immigrants, in the 1920s and ’30s, who worked in low-wage occupations and were forbidden by US immigration laws to bring their wives with them from the Philippines. Filipino farmworkers in California were subjected to harsh racism. Pete Velasco recalled, “When we walked the sidewalks in those early days, they shouted at us, ‘Hey monkey, go home!’”46
Now, four decades after his arrival in the United States, Vera Cruz saw his opportunity to build an organization dedicated to justice and equality. “That’s when I stopped picking grapes for the first time in over twenty years, and I never went back.” The sixty-year-old farmworker became a strike leader. The NFWA was faced with a momentous decision: join their Filipino brothers and sisters on strike or watch from the sidelines. After Dolores Huerta, who had served as secretary-treasurer of AWOC, rushed to the picket line, the NFWA called a meeting to deliberate on the situation. By design, the leadership of the organization decided to hold the strike vote on September 16, Mexican Independence Day. At the meeting, approximately 2,700 NFWA members unanimously voted to support AWOC’s strike against the Coachella grape growers. The die was cast for one of the most important labor struggles in modern American history.47
To win this strike, the farmworkers resurrected a venerable tool of the labor movement: the consumer boycott. In the summer of 1965, the NFWA and AWOC called a boycott on all California table grapes. To win the grape boycott, the union had to educate America about labor. If consumers did not understand who was responsible for tending and harvesting the food that graced their tables, then someone had to teach them. Chávez was blunt: “We need the help of all to add power to the poor.”48 Soon, students joined workers, clergy, and other supporters on boycott committees that were responsible for bringing the boycott to the attention of America and, finally, the world. Members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) who had worked with the civil rights movement in the South played integral roles educating consumers about the grape boycott. The Pittsburgh Courier reported that both the Negro American Labor Council of New York City and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party were actively supporting the boycott. James Farmer, the director of CORE, demanded that Congress “place all agricultural workers under the protection of federal minimum wage and collective bargaining laws. Many Negroes, especially in the southern cotton belt, are not protected by such laws.”49 In the fall of 1968, an FBI agent observed an NAACP-supported parade in Pittsburgh, writing that “approximately 128 individuals composed of both blacks and whites marched from the Hill District to Point Park in downtown Pittsburgh.”50 The source further advised that the march was led by Albert Rojas, a representative of the United Farm Worker Organizing Committee, and was in support of the California grape pickers and their national boycott.
“Who can say ‘no’ to the simple cry for help from the grape pickers in Delano, California?” Charlotte Chase wrote in a letter to the editor in the Baltimore Afro-American. “Their plea is for the right to live
and work in dignity as human beings. The indignities they suffer . . . are of such a nature that news articles and handbills only hint at them.”51 Dolores Huerta, speaking in Washington, DC, noted that growers resorted to the well-known tactic of divide and conquer to undermine the union. The Pittsburgh Courier reported her speech: “Mrs. Huerta pointed out that ‘most of the field workers are Mexican-American, Filipino, Negro and Puerto Rican.’ The growers she said, ‘try to . . . play one race against the other . . . and actually perpetuate race prejudice. . . . It is not just a question of wages. It is a question of human dignity, of equality,’ she asserted.”52
Careful observers of the grape boycott understood what was at stake. In March 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. sent a telegram to Chávez: “My colleagues and I commend you for your bravery, salute you for your indefatigable work against poverty and injustice, and pray for your health and continuing service as one of the outstanding men of America. The plight of your people and ours is so grave that we all desperately need the inspiring example and effective leadership you have given.”53 King supported the boycott because he believed that it represented a two-pronged assault on racism and poverty. “Many white Americans of good will have never connected bigotry with economic exploitation,” he explained. “They have deplored prejudice, but tolerated or ignored economic injustice.”54
By 1970, the grape boycott had cut into growers’ profits and had turned popular opinion against the table grapes industry. It was estimated that 17 percent of the American public supported the boycott.55 In addition, the constant strikes, marches, and organizing in growers’ fields undermined their claims that they knew what was best for “their” workers. On July 29, 1970, the United Farm Workers signed union contracts covering approximately thirty thousand workers in the grape industry. The labor historian Robert Gordon notes, “All of the newly signed contracts insured substantial wage increases, created a union hiring hall, and established strict regulations regarding the use of pesticides.”56
THE ARC OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
African American insurgencies in the South beginning in the 1950s changed the trajectory of American politics and birthed numerous social movements throughout the nation. Each major victory in the Black freedom struggle depended on the self-activity of working-class African Americans to carry the day, beginning with the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott of 1955. In his account of the boycott, Stride Toward Freedom, Martin Luther King Jr. noted, “The majority of the Negroes who took part in the year-long boycott of Montgomery’s buses were poor and untutored; but they understood the essence of the Montgomery movement.”57
While King’s soaring “I Have a Dream” became the mostcited speech given at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, A. Philip Randolph’s address on the perils of job-killing automation, deindustrialization, and labor oppression was equally prophetic.58 Randolph tried to build a universal conception of freedom that was rooted in his people’s experience of slavery and racial capitalism: “For one thing, we must destroy the notion that Mrs. Murphy’s property rights include the right to humiliate me because of the color of my skin. The sanctity of private property takes second place to the sanctity of the human personality. It falls to the Negro to reassert this proper priority of values because our ancestors were transformed from human personalities into private property.” Randolph argued that Americans should support “a free democratic society” with “new forms of social planning, to create full employment, and to put automation at the service of human needs, not at the service of profits.” Randolph drew upon African American history to articulate a socialist vision of the future.59
SNCC discovered that it needed the creative energy of the most oppressed people of the Mississippi Delta to challenge the power of Mississippi’s segregationist leaders. Lawrence Guyot, cofounder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, noted that the MFDP, organized in 1964, was composed primarily of working-class people, “sharecroppers, barbers, and maids” who were able to “take on the most powerful political party in the country.”60 Local people like Bolivar County’s Margaret Block introduced SNCC activists to the traditions of armed self-help in the Deep South, as organizers defended Northern volunteers from Klan violence.61 The MFDP grew so powerful, and produced such a brilliant leader in the person of Fannie Lou Hamer, a former plantation worker, that the president of the United States, Lyndon B. Johnson, was forced to intervene in an effort to derail the MFDP’s national impact during Hamer’s address to the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City.62
African American communities in the North were also rebelling against decades of residential segregation, economic oppression, and police brutality. The Watts rebellion in the summer of 1965 was sparked by a confrontation between Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) officers and a Black motorist. In reality, though, it was decades in the making, a response to the habitual police violence against African Americans and Mexican Americans. The author Gerald Horne writes, “Some officers randomly and arbitrarily beat and tortured black men, even those who were not suspected of anything.” Horne quotes a former LAPD officer who remembered: “‘Bending fingers back, twisting ears, tightening handcuffs into medieval torture devices, slamming the victim’s head into the door while placing him in a vehicle,’ were some of their milder techniques.”63 A municipal judge in San Bernardino, California, told investigators after the riot, “When I review a person’s criminal record for any purposes, I give no weight whatsoever to a Los Angeles felony arrest unless it is followed by a conviction, since in my opinion, it frequently means merely that the defendant was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”64 The LAPD were rarely questioned or disciplined in any way for their attacks on civilians. Horne notes that in the three years preceding the Watts riot, “There were sixty-five inquests involving homicide by officers during that time, and only one ended with a verdict other than justifiable homicide, a case in which two officers ‘playing cops and robbers’ in a Long Beach Police Station shot a newspaperman.”65
Generations of inferior job opportunities, residential segregation, and Mayor Sam Yorty’s blocking the flow of federal antipoverty funds into Los Angeles also fueled anger. When the riot broke out, insurgents and police alike invoked the specter of the war in Southeast Asia. “If I’ve got to die, I ain’t dying in Vietnam, I’m going to die here,” said one rioter, and many others echoed these sentiments.66 As his precinct stations were deluged with calls and false alarms designed to confuse police dispatchers, LAPD Chief William Parker stated, “This situation is very much like fighting the Viet Cong.” The commission that studied the aftermath of the riots rejected Governor Edmund Brown’s idea of creating a major job-creation program to address Black unemployment in Los Angeles, stating, “Obviously such a program is bound to encounter tough sledding in Washington, especially as the Vietnam costs escalate.”67
Martin Luther King’s meetings with the “desperate, rejected, and angry young men” in cities boiling over with violence pushed him to oppose the Vietnam War. King explained to his audience in a speech at Riverside Church on April 4, 1967, that he had urged nonviolence as a tool of social change to youth in
the ghettos of the North over the last three years, especially the last three summers. But they asked, and rightly so, “What about Vietnam?” They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.68
King compared his nation’s attack on Vietnamese peasants to its brutal treatment of poor people at home, many of whom were being sent to fight the war. He noted that the war abroad had destroyed the War on Poverty:
It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor, both black and white, through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes,
new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war. And I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic, destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference began mapping out plans for a massive Poor People’s Campaign.69 The crusade would unite the poor of all races into a nationwide movement that would descend on Washington and stay there until the highest officials in the land agreed to formulate a plan to abolish poverty. “Something is wrong with capitalism as it now stands in the United States,” King observed near the end of 1967. “We are not interested in being integrated into this value structure. Power must be relocated; a radical redistribution of power must take place.”70
Before the Southern Christian Leadership Conference could initiate the Poor People’s Campaign, municipal sanitation workers in Memphis went out on strike on February 12, 1968, to demand higher wages and union recognition from the city government. As the city’s worst-paid public employees, the sanitation workers—“garbage men”—had to carry leaky, fifty-pound garbage pails full of maggoty foul matter from the backyards of affluent Memphians. Most full-time sanitation workers were paid so little that they qualified for welfare. The city did not provide work clothing or gloves, and at the end of the day, the men’s clothing was so drenched with filth that they had to strip outside their houses rather bring the toxic muck into their homes.
The strike captured King’s imagination; he instantly realized that by attempting to unionize, Memphis garbage workers were engaging in the most efficient form of antipoverty activism possible. King rushed to Memphis on March 18 to stand in solidarity with the garbage men. He was assassinated on April 4, 1968—exactly one year to the day after his antiwar address. A week later, the Memphis sanitation workers successfully unionized as members of American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees Local 1733.
