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CHAPTER 1

This Is How a Movement Begins

Elizabeth Sutherland Martínez had chosen her dress just for the occasion—it was red and black to match the flag of the National Farm Workers Association. As one of two Mexican Americans on the staff of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee nationwide, Martínez had traveled from New York City to California’s Central Valley in March 1966 to show support for the union. Led by Cesar Chavez, the farmworkers were marching 250 miles from Delano to Sacramento to draw attention to their struggles against Schenley Industries, one of the largest grape growers in Delano. That evening, as the marchers rested, ate, and visited in a community center in a small, dusty town along the route, Martínez was asked to give a speech on behalf of SNCC. She hurried to the ladies’ room, where she scribbled a short address on a steno pad, changed into her specially selected dress, and ran back to the hall. In Spanish, Martínez spoke for SNCC when she proclaimed, “We are with you and we are proud of your march and your victory because it is a victory for all the poor of the world.”¹

Along the highway leading through the heart of California’s breadbasket, Martínez was far from SNCC’s organizational base in the Deep South. However, SNCC’s participation in and endorsement of the Delano to Sacramento march marked the high point of the alliance that had formed between the civil rights organization and the farmworkers union. Beginning in early 1965, SNCC and the NFWA came together in a productive relationship that demonstrated both organizations’ profound understanding—based on hardwon experience—of the connection between racial discrimination and economic oppression. The NFWA recognized that California’s largely Mexican American farm laborers were both discriminated against as racial minorities and economically exploited by the state’s agribusiness corporations. Therefore the NFWA confronted both forms of oppression in its endeavors. In its pursuit of racial equality on behalf of African Americans in the Deep South, SNCC also challenged America’s economic caste system, which it saw as antithetical to a democratic society. SNCC’s intent to confront not only American racial mores and the political system, but also the nation’s economic and class structure, set it apart from other civil rights organizations. Therefore, the support that SNCC demonstrated for the farmworkers was characteristic of the organization and its ideals about race and class.²

This shared understanding of the connection between racial discrimination and economic oppression formed the basis of the alliance between SNCC and the NFWA because it enabled them to recognize that African Americans and Mexican Americans were victims of the same oppressive forces and led them to see the benefits of a multiracial coalition. On top of this ideological foundation, common organizational praxis of the two groups further facilitated their alliance. However, these factors only led to a coalition between SNCC and the NFWA because of the leadership of individuals who recognized the potential in such a relationship. The resulting alliance enabled each organization to expand its mission and activism by applying its principles across racial lines. As Martínez told the marchers, “It is necessary that blacks and Mexicans see that there is only one cause—justice.”³

* * *

SNCC’s founding reveals the degree to which the organization incorporated economic power in its fight for racial equality. In April 1960, black and white students gathered at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, at the invitation of Ella Baker and SCLC, who wanted to harness the energy of the student-led sit-ins of lunch counters and restaurants that had swept the South since the sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February of that year. These sit-ins were conducted with the knowledge that African Americans possessed economic power as consumers that could be used as a weapon against racial discrimination. Franklin McCain, who as a student at North Carolina A&T College participated in the sit-in at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, explained that they targeted that store because they were allowed—and encouraged—to purchase goods, but were not permitted to eat at the lunch counter: “They tell you to come in: ‘Yes, buy the toothpaste; yes, come in and buy the notebook paper . . . .No, we don’t separate your money in this cash register, but no, please don’t step down to the hot dog stand...’ The whole system, of course, was unjust, but that just seemed like insult added to injury.” By recognizing their power as consumers, the students began to dismantle the system of racial segregation in southern public accommodations. Baker was concerned that the energy and power that the students had demonstrated would dissipate once they achieved their goal of access and integration. Founding SNCC member Julian Bond recalled that Baker thought that the student sit-in movement “had narrow vision and thought the whole world was nothing but lunch counters.” The founding of SNCC at the meeting at Shaw University was thus an attempt to institutionalize the students’ use of economic power to combat racial discrimination.⁴

As SNCC grew and evolved, it fought for racial equality through direct action tactics (such as sit-ins and marches) and through voter registration among African Americans, primarily in the Deep South. Through their efforts in their fight against racial discrimination, SNCC workers were exposed to the economic inequality and exploitation of African Americans. By living and working in small towns in the rural Deep South, SNCC “field secretaries” (the term given to those who organized for SNCC full time) witnessed firsthand the crippling poverty experienced by most African Americans in the region. Furthermore, some SNCC organizers had grown up in rural southern towns and brought their intertwined experiences of poverty and racism to their activism. For example, SNCC field secretary and Mississippi native Lawrence Guyot explained that when African Americans in Greenwood, Mississippi attempted to register to vote, “the county decided that what it would do was it would cut off all welfare supplies. So it did just that. All food was cut off.” Ivanhoe Donaldson, who organized for SNCC in the Mississippi Delta town of Clarksdale, elaborated that when plantation workers tried to register to vote or organize others to do so, “plantation owners were not only being hostile in terms of pushing people off the plantation, but were economically isolating people from credit at stores or from banks.” SNCC workers therefore drew a direct connection between gaining the vote, racial equality, and economic justice.⁵

The treatment of black sharecroppers was remarkably similar to that of Mexican American farmworkers in California. Like African Americans in the South, racial discrimination against Mexican Americans directly affected their opportunities for employment and economic advancement. In the West’s agricultural areas, such as the fertile Central Valley, many worked as migrant farm laborers. The high numbers of Mexican Americans in agriculture resulted from labor policies influenced by racism. Many growers encouraged the government recruitment of Mexicans, whom they stereotyped as docile and obedient, which they argued made them ideally suited for farm labor. Some believed that Mexicans were also uniquely physically adapted to agricultural work. Echoing earlier justifications of the enslavement of Africans, a prominent landowner in California asserted in the Saturday Evening Post in 1928, “Mexican casual labor fills the requirement of the California farm as no other labor has done in the past. The Mexican withstands the high temperatures of the Imperial and San Joaquin valleys.” Paradoxically, employers also claimed that Mexicans were lazy and irresponsible and that they should therefore be paid less than other workers. Similarly, southern planters argued that African Americans were lazy and “shiftless,” which justified both low wages and strict white control and supervision. Furthermore, Mexicans were desirable as workers because—due to racial biases against them and the proximity of the border—they were easily deported when their labor was no longer needed, as was the case during the Great Depression. The growers also opened themselves up to the charge of discrimination against Mexican Americans by their indifference toward the unhealthy and dangerous working conditions to which farmworkers were exposed, including extreme temperatures, lack of fresh water and restrooms in the fields, and the use of hazardous pesticides.⁶

California farmworkers had made several attempts to organize and improve their conditions. For example, in 1928 the Confederación de Uniones Obreras (Federation of Labor Unions) was founded in Los Angeles and promptly organized a strike of cantaloupe workers in the Imperial Valley in Southern California. In the thirteen years following that strike, Mexican American workers organized themselves into unions and conducted strikes in the lettuce, pea, berry, beet, cotton, citrus, celery, and bean fields throughout California in pursuit of higher wages and improved working conditions. However, growers had successfully crushed these efforts through race riots and murders and by firing, evicting, and deporting workers who attempted to organize or strike. Similarly, sharecroppers’ attempts to organize in Arkansas and Alabama in the 1930s were met with evictions, arrests, race riots, and lynchings. Mike Miller—a white SNCC field secretary from San Francisco’s largely Latino Mission District neighborhood who ran that city’s SNCC office—recognized that African Americans and Mexican American agricultural workers experienced identical forms of overlapping racial discrimination and economic oppression. Miller therefore saw it as only fitting that SNCC reach out to California’s exploited farmworkers.⁷

Miller orchestrated SNCC’s involvement with the farmworkers during a time of transition for the organization. The Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, during which SNCC recruited white northern student volunteers to conduct voter registration among African Americans, heightened—and in some cases introduced—tensions regarding SNCC’s structure, direction, and identity. In the wake of beatings, murders, voter intimidation, and the inability of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to gain representation at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, SNCC experienced a period of collective introspection. After the tumultuous summer, SNCC’s national headquarters in Atlanta called for members to present position papers at a staff meeting in Waveland, Mississippi in November 1964. Miller saw the meeting at Waveland as an opportunity to expand the mission of SNCC to include the plight of workers. In response to a questionnaire distributed to SNCC offices nationwide that accompanied the call for papers, Miller wrote,

That the question “what should be SNCC’s position on African affairs?” is raised and the question, for example, “what is SNCC’s position on the labor movement?” is not raised seems to me to ignore what we have to do here and now. . . . The day-to-day world in which we live is such that UAW affairs are probably more relevant to MFDP, COFO [Council of Federated Organizations], and SNCC than African affairs.

Many SNCC members were inspired by recent African liberation struggles and were thus motivated to form connections with countries freed from colonial rule. In fact, a SNCC delegation toured the continent and met with some of the leaders of the newly independent countries in September 1964. But Miller questioned the immediate relevance of Africa’s anticolonial struggles and instead wanted to see SNCC aligned with the farm labor movement.⁸

Miller’s interest in the plight of workers long predated his involvement in SNCC. He recalled, “When I was little, I was on my father’s shoulders on picket lines.” Miller’s father, James Miller, wrote for the newspaper of the International Fishermen and Allied Workers of America, which was expelled from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1950 for being “communist dominated.” As an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, Miller focused his attention on agricultural workers when he became acquainted with veteran labor organizer Anne Draper, who worked with the National Farm Labor Advisory Committee and organized support activities on the Berkeley campus for striking workers. Under Draper’s influence, Miller organized rallies and food and clothing drives on behalf of the United Packinghouse Workers (UPWA) when it struck against cantaloupe growers in the Imperial Valley of California. In 1960, Miller organized the Student Committee for Agricultural Labor, which conducted grassroots organizing among farmworkers.⁹

Following his graduation from UC Berkeley, Miller attended graduate school in sociology at Columbia University. His passion for fighting on behalf of the oppressed followed him to New York City, where he organized public housing tenants on the Lower East Side. After six months, Miller was fired for being “too militant.” He then returned to the Bay Area to resume his graduate studies at the Berkeley. There Miller became re-involved with SLATE, a campus political organization he had helped found as an undergraduate.¹⁰

Miller’s experience could have led directly to a career on behalf of agricultural workers. However, SNCC was in need of his considerable organizing skills. In 1962 SLATE held a conference on “The Negro in America,” in which SNCC chairman Charles McDew participated. At the request of McDew, Miller became the SNCC representative in the Bay Area. Miller joined the SNCC staff full time the following winter, while still a graduate student. Soon after, Sam Block, a SNCC field secretary working on voter registration in Greenwood, Mississippi, went to Berkeley and asked Miller to work in Mississippi, which he did in July 1963.¹¹

After being severely injured when his car was run off the road by hostile whites in Mississippi, Miller returned to expand SNCC activities in the Bay Area by setting up a Friends of SNCC office in San Francisco, part of a network of volunteers who worked to support the organization’s activities in the South. In addition, Miller and fellow activist Terence “Terry” Cannon established Freedom House, which organized against the redevelopment of the Fillmore District, a historically African American neighborhood in San Francisco. According to Cannon, the redevelopment project “was tearing the heart out of the black community there.” Miller and Cannon’s work against urban renewal was supported by the national SNCC office. Miller explained, “SNCC support work went well in the Bay Area, so national headquarters waived the usual rule that ‘field secretaries’ in the north were only to work on southern support. I was able to divide my time between support work for the South and participation in several losing San Francisco battles against urban renewal.” The San Francisco Friends of SNCC soon became a bona fide SNCC chapter, one of nine “northern offices” outside the Deep South and the only one in northern California. Miller asked Cannon to edit the office’s newsletter, which quickly evolved into The Movement, the national publication of SNCC.¹²

Miller and his colleagues in San Francisco SNCC firmly believed that SNCC’s organizing techniques could—and should—be applied to farmworkers in California. In their pursuit of civil rights, SNCC field secretaries practiced participatory democracy, which SNCC organizer Cleveland Sellers defined as “local people working to develop the power to control the significant events that affected their lives.” Operating under that philosophy, SNCC field secretaries did not impose leadership, but rather worked to identify indigenous leaders in the community and cultivate their leadership skills. Furthermore, SNCC organizers did not dictate to people what they should be fighting for and how they should go about it. Instead, they conducted what historian Charles Payne refers to as “slow and respectful work” in order to discern people’s interests and concerns before attempting to persuade them to register to vote. Miller described the ideal organizer who followed this model in an editorial in The Movement: “An organizer doesn’t like to do all the talking. He talks; he listens; he asks questions. He operates on the principle that the people in the streets, in the neighborhoods, in the fields, in the plants, on the unemployed lines, on the welfare rolls know better than he what they want and need—but they don’t know how to get it.” Thus, a good organizer, according to SNCC, helped empower people to make meaningful and lasting changes in their communities.¹³

SNCC’s organizing philosophy and tactics strongly resembled Chavez’s mission to empower farmworkers. Like SNCC, Chavez knew that effective organizing was slow work because it relied on making personal connections. He explained,

There are also some very simple things that have to be done in organizing, certain key things that nobody could get away without doing, like talking to people. If you talk to people, you’re going to organize them. But people aren’t going to come to you. You have to go to them. It takes a lot of work. When you pick grapes, you pick a bunch at a time. Eventually you pick the whole vineyard. Organizing is no different.

Chavez began his career as an organizer through the Community Service Organization (CSO), a Mexican American civil rights organization based in Southern California. Founded in 1947 in the wake of Edward Roybal’s first campaign for Los Angeles city council, the CSO began as a mutual aid society that encouraged political participation and integration of Mexican Americans. Fred Ross, the white West Coast regional director of Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), became CSO executive director. Ross recruited and trained Chavez to be an organizer for the CSO in 1952.¹⁴

One of Ross’s most important organizing tactics that he taught Chavez was the house meeting. This method was completely dependent on personal connections; once the organizer identified an interested person, she/he would ask that person to hold a small meeting in their home and to invite a few of their friends. The intimacy of the small house meeting would then allow people to speak freely about their concerns. Chavez recalled, “When I talked to people at their homes, it was unbelievable how their attitude changed, how different it was from when I talked to them in the fields.” After conducting house meetings for several weeks, a mass meeting would be held to organize a CSO chapter. Similarly, after SNCC organizers had been canvassing in African American communities for some time, they held mass meetings to bring people together, create a sense of solidarity, and mobilize people to action. As historian Charles Payne argued in his study of civil rights organizing in Mississippi,

Maybe canvassing is the prototypical organizing act. It is the initial reaching out to the community, the first step toward building relationships outside the circle of those favorably predisposed to the movement. Mass meetings were another step in that process. If canvassers could awaken an initial curiosity in people, mass meetings could weld curiosity into commitment.

The same argument could be made about the role of organizers and mass meetings in the CSO, which demonstrates that many of the activities of the early CSO resembled those of SNCC.¹⁵

The CSO and SNCC both sought political power for their communities through voter registration. However, since many CSO members were not U.S. citizens, Ross implemented citizenship classes that eventually become key components of every CSO chapter. The classes were open to all ages and included literacy instruction. Chavez recalled of the classes, “Where the kids sat during the day, the parents would sit at night, and we not only taught them the Constitution and basic English but we also taught them to fill out all the citizenship forms.” In both format and content, CSO citizenship classes paralleled SNCC voter registration efforts. In the South, African Americans were prevented from registering to vote in many ways, including through the use of literacy tests. In some areas, African Americans who wished to register were asked to interpret a section of the Constitution. SNCC therefore devised education programs that taught literacy and government and instructed adults in the process of voter registration.¹⁶

After serving as the director of the CSO, Chavez resigned to work on behalf of farmworkers and founded the NFWA in 1962. However, he took Ross’s lessons in organizing and applied them to the recruitment of farmworkers. The similarities between Chavez’s and SNCC’s approaches to organizing facilitated the eventual alliance between the two organizations. The work of Chavez and SNCC became even more closely aligned when SNCC began organizing migrant farmworkers on Maryland’s eastern shore in 1964. It was this project that convinced Mike Miller that SNCC’s techniques could be applied to Mexican American farmworkers in California. Even though the migrant farmworkers on the East Coast were primarily African American, Miller persuaded SNCC to explore the idea of voter registration among California’s Mexican American farmworkers, whom he saw as suffering from the same racial discrimination and economic exploitation. In December 1964 Miller wrote a letter to the national SNCC staff outlining a proposal to organize farmworkers in California. Miller explained, “Some of you have heard me talk about the California Valley. It is our Delta. It is a land of immense richness and the deepest of poverty.” Miller was especially interested in working with the NFWA, which he had learned of through Ross, whom he had met through his activities at UC Berkeley.¹⁷

Immediately after SNCC approved his program, Miller contacted the union in January 1965 through his friend Coleman Blease, a Sacramento lawyer who had worked with NFWA co-founder Dolores Huerta, to discuss voter registration. Blease wrote to Huerta in January of 1965, requesting a meeting between Chavez, Huerta, Miller, and Bob Moses, director of SNCC organizing in Mississippi. Blease opined, “I believe that any cooperative venture between SNCC and the Farm Workers Association would be most fruitful.” Although Chavez did not attend the meeting, which occurred in late January 1965, it established the first formal connection between SNCC and the NFWA.¹⁸

Miller’s actions demonstrate the importance of individual leadership in coalition building. Although significant, parallel ideologies and praxis did not necessarily lead to the formation of alliances between organizations. For example, scholars have pointed out that although the NAACP had much in common with LULAC, they did not work together, even when both organizations were fighting school segregation in the courts. Individuals were necessary to recognize the potential of working with others and lead their organizations to form a coalition. Miller’s background in both labor and civil rights organizing enabled him to serve as a bridge between the NFWA and SNCC and guide the formation of their alliance.¹⁹

* * *

True to Blease’s prediction, the newly formed alliance between SNCC and the NFWA proved invaluable for the farmworkers just a few months after the initial meeting between the two organizations. In July 1965, the NFWA and the California Migrant Ministry (CMM)—an offshoot of the National Council of Churches that both ministered to farmworkers and assisted them in their fight for justice—organized a rent strike against the Tulare County Housing Authority. The Housing Authority had doubled the rent at the Woodville and Linnell labor camps, despite no increase in pay for the farmworker residents and no improvement of the unsanitary, Depressionera tin huts, which the County Health Department had condemned. Finding themselves ill-prepared for a rent strike, the CMM’s Reverend Jim Drake and Gilbert Padilla, who had worked with Chavez in the CSO, called on the San Francisco SNCC office to send organizers to assist. The SNCC volunteers who heeded the call were especially helpful when 350 farmworkers and supporters marched six miles from the Linnell camp to the Housing Authority offices. The influence of SNCC’s use of nonviolent direct action was clear in the rules given to the marchers, which began, “All participants in this action project are asked to maintain discipline and conduct themselves in a nonviolent manner. Nonviolence has been shown to be a powerful force when used by a dedicated group trained in understanding and discipline.” The rules’ emphasis on nonviolence reflected SNCC’s founding statement, which proclaimed, “By appealing to conscience and standing on the moral nature of human existence, nonviolence nurtures the atmosphere in which reconciliation and justice become actual possibilities.”²⁰

Figure 1. Child in front of a dilapidated house in a farm labor camp. Courtesy of Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.

Along with contributing strategy, SNCC also supported the rent strike by diligently reporting on it in The Movement. According to Cannon, the newspaper’s staff “saw early just simply the need to publicize what was going on.” Although San Francisco SNCC published the newspaper, it was disseminated to SNCC and Friends of SNCC offices nationwide. Through The Movement, many in SNCC first learned of racial and social problems outside the South. For example, to illustrate the similarities between farmworkers on the East and West Coasts, the front page of the August 1965 issue of The Movement placed an article on the Tulare County strike next to an article on the Tennessee Freedom Labor Union, an organization of black farmworkers and sharecroppers. Subsequent issues of The Movement included additional pieces on farmworkers and reprinted articles from El Malcriado, the NFWA newspaper. Along with Miller, the staff of The Movement operated as bridge leaders by highlighting the commonalities, rather than the differences, between the NFWA and the civil rights movement.²¹

The Movement took such a great interest in the rent strike because the newspaper’s staff included members who shared a background in the labor movement and an interest in the struggles of agricultural workers. Editor Terry Cannon was a Midwestern Quaker whose mother had reported on sharecroppers during the Great Depression. One of The Movement’s most prolific photographers and writers was George Ballis. Following a short stint as a factory worker in Chicago, Ballis moved to Fresno, California, in January 1953 to edit the Valley Labor Citizen, a weekly pro-union newspaper. He soon became interested in farmworkers and began photographing them. Ballis became acquainted with SNCC and several of its staff members, including Mississippi field secretary Lawrence Guyot, in 1963 when he drove to the South with donations for the organization from the students of California State University, Fresno. In 1964, Ballis volunteered for SNCC as a photographer. When Mike Miller set up the SNCC office in San Francisco, Guyot suggested that Ballis be added to the staff. Ballis’s interest in agricultural workers provided The Movement with a significant degree of knowledge and sophistication about the plight of the farmworkers.²²

The Movement’s staff also brought with them a profound understanding of economic inequality. Hardy Frye, another early staff member, grew up in Tuskegee, Alabama where he experienced the strict class divisions within the black community. As a young man in Tuskegee, he was not allowed to date the daughters of the black elite because he was “from the other side of the tracks.” He later reflected that his early experiences shaped his activism: “I probably brought an ideology to my Movement work . . . and it was class based.” His disgust with the city’s black elite led Frye to join the Army in order to escape Tuskegee. Stationed in Texas, Frye met Latinos for the first time and began to recognize the similarities between their experiences with discrimination and those of African Americans. After being discharged, he moved to Los Angeles, where he was active in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Through his activism, Frye met Mike Miller and helped establish the Sacramento Friends of SNCC while a student at Sacramento City College. He then went to Mississippi in 1964 as a volunteer for Freedom Summer, after which he returned to Sacramento and the Friends of SNCC chapter there. In this capacity, Frye worked closely with Father Keith Kenney, parish priest of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Sacramento, who ministered to farmworkers in the area and strongly supported the NFWA.²³

SNCC’s support was enormously beneficial to the Tulare County rent strike. SNCC’s organizing techniques, as well as the publicity in The Movement, helped the farmworkers put constant pressure on the county Housing Authority. In the face of legal challenges, a district judge upheld the legality of the rent strike and declared the rent increases illegal. After over three years of delay, 100 new residences were built at the Woodville and Linnell Labor Camps in 1968. The rent strike was also successful in educating farmworkers about the NFWA. Chavez noted, “Short of getting into an agricultural strike, the rent strike . . . was one of the best ways of educating farm workers that there was a Union concerned with their economic interests.” Furthermore, the NFWA, CMM, and farmworkers greatly appreciated the SNCC members who helped with the rent strike and march and valued their experience. Padilla recalled, “Those young men, or these young people I should say, were guys who had been in Mississippi and stuff. So they were already trained in marches and how to deal. They came with the perspective.”²⁴

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The alliance that had blossomed between SNCC and the NFWA was based on shared ideas and values: commitment to justice and equality, acknowledgement of the importance of personal connections in organizing, and a profound understanding of the relationship between racial discrimination and economic oppression. Furthermore, SNCC shared common organizing techniques and strategies with the CSO, in which the NFWA leaders had been trained as organizers. These qualities continued to sustain the relationship between the two organizations as the NFWA embarked on the most pivotal moment of its history. On September 16, 1965, Mexican Independence Day, the NFWA voted to join AWOC, a union of Filipino farmworkers, in their strike of grape growers in the Delano area. In the spring of 1965 AWOC staged a series of successful strikes in Coachella Valley, California to demand higher wages. When growers in Delano refused to meet the same demand for equal wages, the Filipino grape pickers went on strike at nine vineyards. Knowing that a farmworker strike could not succeed in Delano without the support of Mexican American farmworkers, AWOC leader Larry Itliong turned to Chavez. Chavez was initially caught off guard when Itliong approached him because the NFWA was still a growing organization and did not have the monetary reserves to support a strike by thousands of workers. Nevertheless, Chavez realized that only a united workforce could effectively pressure the growers into signing contracts. The coalition between AWOC and the NFWA echoed the CSO’s earlier cross-racial alliances with Asian American groups in Los Angeles to achieve political progress. Moreover, the alliance with the Filipino AWOC demonstrated that although the membership of the NFWA was overwhelmingly Mexican American, its fight for economic justice and equality for farmworkers was truly multiracial.²⁵

As soon as the NFWA joined the strike, the growers, police, and townspeople became increasingly hostile and violent toward the farmworkers. Chavez recalled, “Growers pushed people around on the picket lines, ran tractors between pickets and the field to cover them with dust and dirt, drove cars and pickups with guns and dogs dangerously close to pickets at high speeds.” Chavez had studied Gandhi and was determined that the strike be nonviolent, which was becoming increasingly difficult as violence toward the strikers continued and tensions in the town of Delano escalated due to the arrival of press covering the strike. Furthermore, NFWA organizer Wendy Goepel Brooks acknowledged that “the farm workers were not necessarily at all nonviolent by nature, to put it mildly.” Recalling the influence of SNCC’s strategy of nonviolent direct action during the Tulare County rent strike, Chavez personally asked the San Francisco SNCC office to send organizers to Delano to teach courses on nonviolent resistance to the farmworkers. In doing so, he placed great importance on the experience the SNCC activists had gained in the southern civil rights movement. He explained, “In the beginning, the staff people didn’t thoroughly understand the whole idea of nonviolence, so I sent out the word to get young people who had been in the South and knew how to struggle nonviolently.”²⁶

Chavez also called on CORE to send volunteers, due to the civil rights organization’s roots in pacifism and Gandhian nonviolent direct action. CORE volunteers taught classes in nonviolent resistance to the farmworkers and joined picket lines at the edges of the grape fields. On picket lines, CORE and SNCC members were especially valued for their experience in dealing with law enforcement. A NFWA leader explained, “You just couldn’t have someone who had never been on a picket line before. We needed somebody who could talk to the cops—or who had the confidence to talk to the cops.” However, the CORE volunteers soon moved on to other projects. In contrast, SNCC’s involvement with the NFWA grew to include additional staff members and volunteers throughout California. This was partly the result of SNCC’s loose structure, which encouraged, and even relied on, individual initiative. Offices and field secretaries were expected to develop their own projects that reflected the needs and issues of their communities. When successful, these regional projects became SNCC programs. SNCC field secretaries therefore had tremendous freedom in developing projects, as long as they adhered to SNCC’s overall mission. The San Francisco SNCC office was therefore allowed to act as it saw fit on behalf of the NFWA.²⁷

One of the first organizers SNCC sent to assist the NFWA was Marshall Ganz, a white staff member originally from Bakersfield, California, thirty miles south of Delano. While a student at Harvard University, Ganz joined the local Friends of SNCC. In 1964 he participated in Mississippi Freedom Summer, during which he worked with Hardy Frye. In September of that year, Ganz dropped out of Harvard to join the SNCC staff. By 1965, Ganz was conducting voter registration work in Amite County, Mississippi and living with E. W. Steptoe, head of the Amite NAACP. Ganz’s interest in the NFWA was piqued when the August 1965 issue of The Movement, which reported the events of the Tulare County rent strike, arrived at Steptoe’s house. Ganz recalled in the introduction to his study of the union,

Although I had grown up in the midst of the farm worker world, I had never really seen it. But Mississippi had taught many of us that it was not an exception, but rather a clearly drawn example of how race, politics, and power work in America. This gave me the “Mississippi eyes” to see where I had grown up in a new way. I now saw farm workers who faced challenges not unlike those faced by their southern counterparts: no voting power, low wages, and, as people of color, subjected to California’s own legacy of racial discrimination, which began with the Chinese immigrants. Now, they too were fighting back with their own movement.

His recognition that the Mexican American farmworkers in California and African Americans in the Deep South were suffering from the same forms of exploitation and discrimination prompted him to return to Bakersfield that fall. Upon his arrival, Ganz met with LeRoy Chatfield, a former Christian Brother with whom he had organized a Bakersfield Friends of SNCC chapter the previous year and who was now working as Cesar Chavez’s assistant. Soon afterward, Ganz heard Chavez speak to the Council for Civic Unity in Bakersfield. Chavez recalled, “After my talk, he came up to say hello, and someone told me he had just come from Mississippi. I made a point of talking to him some more.” Following a weekend spent driving Chavez around the Bay Area during a fundraising tour, Ganz began working for the farmworkers full time while still a SNCC staff member.²⁸

Ganz’s position as SNCC’s representative in the NFWA points to the multiracial nature of the coalition between the two organizations. Although the recognition of common experiences of African Americans and Mexican Americans was the cornerstone of the alliance, their relationship did not revolve around a racial binary. Rather, the alliance was reflective of each group’s commitment to multiracial solidarity. SNCC, while focused on equality for African Americans, included white members from its founding and eventually included Latinas as well. African Americans, Asians, Puerto Ricans, Arabs, and whites (mostly “Okies” and their descendants), were among the members of the majority Mexican American NFWA. Similarly, despite its reputation as a Mexican American organization, the CSO “was an interracial endeavor” and had a diverse membership. That white men—Miller, Ganz, Cannon, and Ballis—played central roles in engineering and sustaining the coalition between the NFWA and SNCC was both indicative of the frequency of cross-racial cooperation in these organizations and inconsequential to the farmworkers.²⁹

Indeed, the NFWA welcomed the civil rights activists who came to their aid—regardless of their race—with open arms. Eliseo Medina, a young farmworker who had broken his piggy bank to join the NFWA when the strike began, appreciated the skills that SNCC workers brought to the strike. Growing up, he felt that there was no way to challenge the power held by the growers. He attributed the tactics and bravery of SNCC to changing this attitude. Medina recalled, “I think SNCC people were the only ones that really had any kind of concept about what to do. Particularly in things like marches and demonstrations and all those tools of the civil rights movement, hell, we didn’t have a clue.” Wendy Goepel Brooks acknowledged that at the beginning of the strike very few farmworkers had a practical knowledge of protesting, which resulted in “the blind leading the blind.” She believed SNCC’s greatest contribution was teaching the “not particularly nonviolent” farmworkers about the importance of nonviolence. She recalled that SNCC organizers who joined the strike “came up with new ideas about non-violent methods to use to convey our message about the strike in Delano. They preached non-violence and supported Cesar’s contention that the strike had to remain non-violent or we would all be losers.” NFWA meeting minutes reveal that the farmworkers warmly received SNCC’s lessons in nonviolent resistance. At one meeting, picket captain Julio Hernandez thanked volunteers from SNCC “for classes in non-violence which they have conducted for other staff members.”³⁰

Despite the warm welcome that SNCC workers received from most of the farmworkers, some in the NFWA initially cautioned Chavez against recruiting volunteers from the civil rights movement. Those opposed to the NFWA also resented the presence of the SNCC volunteers, particularly those who were white. Al Espinosa, a Mexican American captain in the Delano police department, told journalist John Gregory Dunne, “I abhor those SNCC Anglos coming in here to teach the Mexicans how to be civilized and nonviolent. My people are by nature nonviolent and we don’t need Anglos to teach us nonviolence.” While Espinosa resented the implication that white SNCC volunteers were instructing the farmworkers in nonviolent resistance, many of the growers used SNCC’s presence to deny that the farmworkers wanted to strike and to blame any such activity on outside agitators. The NFWA actively rebuffed such claims in ways that reaffirmed their connection to the civil rights activists. Chavez told Dunne, “They say the farm workers are happy living the way they are—just like the Southern plantation owner used to say about his Negroes.”³¹

The involvement of volunteers from SNCC and other progressive organizations also increased the already substantial red-baiting of the union. Southern whites had long accused civil rights organizations and activists of Communism as a way to diminish support for the movement and deflect attention from their complicity in racial discrimination and segregation. Southern business owners also labeled unions as Communist in part to prevent cross-racial unity among black and white workers. Following the same strategies as their southern counterparts, California growers and their allies (including the far right, anticommunist John Birch Society) similarly levied charges of Communism against the NFWA. The alliance with SNCC thus opened the NFWA to further red-baiting because, according to Dunne, “in Delano, such associations were tantamount to taking instructions from Peking.” Nevertheless, Chavez was determined to continue working with these new allies because he believed that the benefits to the NFWA outweighed any negative repercussions. He explained, “If we were nothing but farm workers in the Union now, just Mexican farm workers, we’d only have about 30 percent of all the ideas that we have. There would be no cross-fertilization, no growing. It’s beautiful to work with other groups, other ideas, and other customs. It’s like the wood is laminated.” Chavez’s commitment to multiracial coalition building stemmed from his experience with the CSO, which engaged in numerous coalitions with African American, Jewish, and Asian American groups. CSO leaders believed that such collaboration was necessary—especially in racially and ethnically diverse California—to achieve progress and reduce discrimination.³²

The relationship between SNCC and the farmworkers was facilitated by the fact that the NFWA had positioned itself as a movement, rather than as a labor union. As such, the farmworkers felt a kinship with civil rights activists and took inspiration from the milestones of the civil rights movement. For example, a flier advertising a march and rally for the Tulare County rent strike dubbed the region, “California’s Selma.” The NFWA newspaper El Malcriado editorialized about the situation in Tulare County,

In the rent strike once again the farm worker is showing what he learned from the Negro movement. . . . Each day the working people are proving their courage more and more as the Negroes do in their movement. The day in which we the farm workers apply this lesson with the same courage which has been shown in Alabama and Mississippi, this will be the day in which the misfortune of the farm workers will end.

When the NFWA joined AWOC in its strike against Delano grape growers, El Malcriado likened the strike to the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. El Malcriado elaborated: “This is how a movement begins. This is why the farm workers association is a ‘movement’ more than a ‘union.’ Once a movement begins it is impossible to stop. It will sweep through California and it will not be over until the farm worker has the equality of a living wage and decent treatment.”³³

The members of SNCC also related to the NFWA as a movement. SNCC frequently had a contentious relationship with some of the leaders of other major unions. Those in SNCC who did not approve of an alliance with organized labor nonetheless eagerly supported the NFWA on the basis of the farmworkers’ pursuit of racial equality. As Terry Cannon explained, “The core of the connection [between SNCC and the NFWA] was the similarity in treatment of blacks in the South and Latinos in the West and Southwest.” The fact that the union and SNCC combated both economic and racial discrimination enabled the alliance between the two organizations.³⁴

* * *

This feeling of kinship and common purpose prompted SNCC to rally to the side of the NFWA. However, SNCC’s involvement in the Delano strike was initially limited to the activities of the San Francisco staff, as the national organization’s headquarters in Atlanta was at first ignorant of the relationship that had blossomed between it and the NFWA. On September 25, 1965, Muriel Tillinghast in the national SNCC office sent a letter to Chavez explaining the organization and asking him for information on the NFWA. The national SNCC office did not appear to be aware of the strike because Tillinghast did not mention it. In the postscript, she informed him that “SNCC folk in San Francisco are working with Mexican-American [sic] and you might want to contact them . . . Mike Miller heads that office.” While this must have been confusing to Chavez and embarrassing to the San Francisco SNCC staff, who had been working with the NFWA for several months, it is not surprising due to SNCC’s loose structure, which fostered the independence of its offices. However, this loose structure also resulted in disarray and a breakdown in communication within the SNCC staff.³⁵

The Movement was instrumental in eliminating the communication gap between the national and San Francisco SNCC offices. The October 1965 issue covered the strike on the front page and featured an interview with Chavez that was conducted on September 25, making it the first interview with Chavez since the beginning of the strike. The issue also included articles explaining the strike in detail, an account of Terry Cannon’s firsthand experience on the picket line, and a call for donations for the farmworkers. These articles, particularly one on the harassment and physical assault of the striking farmworkers by growers and the police, demonstrated that the NFWA faced many of the same challenges as SNCC organizers in the South. The October 1965 edition of The Movement not only served to increase the national SNCC office’s awareness of the issues confronted by the NFWA, but it also prompted the rest of the organization to support the strike. Despite the fact that the SNCC offices outside San Francisco were slower to come to the aid of the NFWA, they were eventually able to embrace the union’s cause wholeheartedly because the farmworkers’ fight against both racial discrimination and economic oppression fit SNCC’s mission and resembled its experiences.³⁶

With the approval of the national SNCC headquarters, which distributed funding to local projects, overall SNCC participation in the strike accelerated. The organization supplied the NFWA with two-way radios, which were vital to the strike’s effectiveness. The total area of the strike was one thousand square miles, which made it difficult for the NFWA to monitor farm owners’ use of scab labor. With the radios, scouts could quickly inform the NFWA office when scabs entered the fields. The union could then send pickets to the fields being worked by scabs. Moreover, as SNCC was well aware, two-way radios could be life-saving apparatus in the face of violence by growers and police. In July 1965 SNCC set up a radio network for the Louisiana chapter of CORE. Three months later SNCC asked Louisiana CORE to return the favor by lending four of the radios to the NFWA. These radios supplemented those sent to Delano from SNCC offices in the South. SNCC not only supplied the radios, but also obtained a business band license for the NFWA to use.³⁷

Even though the national SNCC office supported the strike, it initially appeared detached and uninterested, especially in comparison to the involvement of the San Francisco SNCC office. In November 1965, a frustrated Mike Miller wrote to the national office asking why no one had addressed his repeated requests, which included the addition of George Ballis to the SNCC staff and scholarship money for Hardy Frye so that he could continue working for SNCC. Miller also proposed that Chavez be invited to SNCC’s national staff meeting at the end of the month and that SNCC chairman John Lewis issue a statement in support of the strike, uniting the plights of Mexican American farmworkers and African American sharecroppers and proclaiming that “we, as a civil rights organization, are concerned with the human rights of all people.” Miller received little sympathy from the national headquarters; in a reply sent November 20, a staff member in the national SNCC office, which was responsible for hiring staff, informed him that she did not know who George Ballis was and added, “If we are to request additional salaries, I tend to think that we should take care of the most pressing needs first.” She also noted that SNCC executive secretary James Forman thought that attending the SNCC staff meeting would take Chavez away from the strike for too long, but “if Chaves [sic] wants to come bring him.” No mention was made of a statement from Lewis.³⁸

Despite the aloofness of the SNCC headquarters, Miller worked to ensure that its support for the NFWA not only continued, but increased. At Miller’s invitation, Chavez and Forman spoke at the statewide meeting of California SNCC and Friends of SNCC groups in November 1965. A few days later, Miller and Marshall Ganz attended the national SNCC staff meeting and gave a presentation on the Delano strike as part of a panel on migrant labor organizing. Although Chavez did not attend the meeting, Miller recalled that the SNCC staff members who were present were “curious, interested, very positive.” As a result of their presentation, the SNCC staff voted to give full support to the union and to allow Ganz to represent SNCC on the NFWA staff while still paying him as a SNCC field secretary. The national SNCC office also agreed to provide the farmworkers with extra manpower. In December 1965, a small delegation from SNCC, including Stokely Carmichael, Cleveland Sellers, and Ralph Featherstone, visited Chavez at the NFWA office in Delano to discuss how SNCC could further help the union. After the meeting, the group adjourned to the local hangout, People’s Bar, to drink beer and play pool. Ganz recalled, “Cesar was quite a pool player and so was Stokely and I think they surprised each other.” As a result of this meeting, SNCC sent Richard “Dickie” Flowers, an African American field secretary from Greenwood, Mississippi, to work with Ganz.³⁹

Due to their work in the Deep South, Ganz and Flowers were assigned to organize in Bakersfield, a farming town south of Delano where there were more African American farmworkers than in other parts of the Central Valley. African Americans were a small percentage of farmworkers in both the NFWA and California, but Chavez was committed to organizing them as well. In an attempt to prevent workers from joining together to demand higher wages and better working conditions, growers separated workers by race. Organizing African American farmworkers, then, would create a sense of multiracial solidarity among the farmworkers and reduce strike breaking. Chavez explained, “Discrimination is bad for all the moral reasons, but it is also bad for reasons of unity. It can quickly destroy the Movement.” Chavez’s commitment to multiracial equality derived from his experience with the CSO. In the early 1950s, most members of the San Jose, California, chapter left after the president, Chavez’s sister Rita, attempted to punish a member for not allowing African Americans in his restaurant. Although the chapter nearly dissolved, Chavez stood by his sister’s decision: “We had a very strong commitment to civil rights. But if we wanted civil rights for us, then we certainly had to respect the rights of blacks, Jews, and other minorities.” The understanding that both Mexican Americans and African Americans experienced discrimination based on race and class thus infused the activities of the NFWA from its founding and predated the involvement of SNCC. The civil rights organization, however, was able to lend its experience in organizing African Americans in the South, many of whom were agricultural workers, to aid the union’s cause.⁴⁰

In organizing African American farmworkers in Bakersfield, Ganz and Flowers utilized SNCC’s strategies, such as field secretaries working in interracial pairs. When conducting voter registration in Mississippi, for example, SNCC volunteers canvassed in interracial pairs to prevent local African Americans from facetiously agreeing to register to vote just to appease (and get rid of) the white organizer. However, Ganz and Flowers also learned and employed the organizing techniques developed by Chavez, such as the house meeting. By combining the organizing strategies of SNCC and the NFWA, Ganz and Flowers were able to recruit African American farmworkers, as well as white and Puerto Rican ones, to the union. Mack Lyons, a black farmworker who had migrated to Bakersfield from Texas in 1965, first noticed Ganz and Flowers passing out leaflets outside the DiGiorgio Corporation’s Arvin Ranch in Bakersfield: “We stopped and talked. I gave Marshall my address, and I asked him if he could come by my house that night. He and Richard Flowers almost beat me there.” Although Lyons did not join the NFWA that day, he joined at the next house meeting and went on to become one of the union’s foremost organizers.⁴¹

* * *

SNCC’s involvement with the farmworkers intensified beginning in December 1965 when Chavez asked Mike Miller to coordinate a national boycott of Schenley Industries, a liquor company that owned one of the largest of the ranches being struck by the NFWA. The boycott had been the idea of Jim Drake, who took his cue from the civil rights movement: “Blacks used to boycott stores that wouldn’t hire them. So we decided to try it.” Chavez and Drake both recognized the effectiveness of the economic boycott as a weapon for civil rights, which had been employed so effectively during the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the earlier “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns. Although the Schenley boycott addressed the low wages and unsafe working conditions of the farmworkers rather than exclusion from employment, like these earlier examples, it demonstrated the connection between racial and economic inequality and therefore dovetailed with SNCC’s civil rights activism. The NFWA’s boycott of Schenley Industries took full advantage of SNCC’s skills, as well as its network of field secretaries and supporters. In fact, the decision to boycott Schenley came about after Chavez asked SNCC volunteers to research the connections of the Delano growers. The SNCC volunteers discovered that Schenley distributed well-known whiskeys such as Cutty Sark, as well as wine made with Delano grapes. Drake, Chavez, Miller and others recognized that Schenley products would be effective boycott targets because Americans could easily identify the company’s brands, as opposed to those of grapes.⁴²

Even before the boycott began, SNCC was able to use its notoriety to gain publicity for the farmworkers’ fight against Schenley. Two months before the NFWA announced the boycott, SNCC began weekly picket lines in front of the company’s San Francisco offices. On discovering the pickets, Schenley executives wrongly assumed SNCC wanted the company to hire more African Americans. They quickly informed various civil rights organizations that they had a “Negro Vice-President.” The Movement reported, “On learning that the issue was not their treatment of Negroes, but their treatment of Mexican-Americans, they had nothing to say.” Once the boycott began, SNCC helped spread it nationwide through publicity in The Movement.⁴³

The spread of the Schenley boycott nationwide enabled SNCC and Friends of SNCC chapters outside California to participate. The New York SNCC office was particularly helpful to the boycott because Schenley’s national headquarters were in that city and the local SNCC office could therefore put constant pressure on the company. In early December, Wendy Goepel Brooks visited New York SNCC and suggested that both SNCC and the local CORE chapter coordinate picket lines at New York and New Jersey grocery stores and schedule a meeting with Schenley executives to urge negotiations with the union. New York SNCC and CORE went into action immediately, organizing a letter-writing campaign and holding meetings on boycott action. They also conducted visits to liquor stores where delegations asked managers to remove Schenley products from their shelves and to display posters acknowledging their support of the strike. If managers did not comply, picket lines appeared outside the stores to inform consumers about the boycott. Twenty liquor stores in Brooklyn complied with the boycott within three weeks. SNCC and CORE were even more successful in Harlem, where all forty-nine stores visited by the activists agreed to cooperate with the boycott. The Movement reported on their effective tactics: “One reluctant retailer found himself with 30 or more would-be customers milling around his store but making no purchases. He got the point and joined his fellow merchants in boycotting Schenley.” SNCC and CORE’s stunning success on behalf of the NFWA in majority African American areas reveals that the organizations’ actions educated their constituencies on the connections between the racial and economic oppression experienced by African Americans and Mexican Americans.⁴⁴

Participating in the farmworkers’ battle with Schenley allowed SNCC to demonstrate that it could apply its activist philosophy and tactics to oppressed groups other than African Americans. The final issue of The Student Voice, the national SNCC headquarters’ newsletter, urged readers to boycott Schenley products. The national headquarters also sent a memo to all Friends of SNCC chapters informing them of the strike details and instructing all to support the strike and the boycott. The memo explicitly linked the struggles of SNCC and the NFWA: “The workers have been harassed by strikebreaking tactics reminiscent of the 1930s and with police oppression typical of Birmingham’s Bull Connor and Selma’s Jim Clark.”⁴⁵

* * *

Members of SNCC were also involved when the union chose to utilize the march, a long-favored tactic of the civil rights movement and other American social movements. In February 1966 Chavez, Ganz, Dolores Huerta, and other NFWA organizers gathered at a supporter’s home near Santa Barbara for a three-day strategy meeting. During a brainstorming session over how to increase the visibility of the Schenley boycott, someone suggested marching from California to Schenley headquarters in New York, likening it to the Selma to Montgomery march of 1965. Realizing that New York was too far, someone else suggested that they march to the Schenley offices in San Francisco. But Chavez questioned whether Schenley would respond, so he recommended marching to Sacramento to put pressure on Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown to intervene. He also reasoned that Sacramento was an appropriate target because the California Fair Trade Act set a minimum price for liquor, meaning that “the California Legislature guaranteed a high price to Schenley for the liquor it made, but denied farm workers the right to a minimum wage.” Chavez further argued that since the season of Lent neared, this protest would not simply be a march. Rather, the protest should be a pilgrimage in the tradition of a Mexican peregrinación that would arrive in the capital on Easter Sunday. Chavez explained, “This was a penance more than anything else—and it was quite a penance, because there was an awful lot of suffering involved in this pilgrimage, a great deal of pain.” Chavez requested that Marshall Ganz coordinate the march and Terry Cannon serve as press secretary. With Miller, Ganz, and Cannon in charge of the boycott and march, SNCC activists were indispensable to the NFWA’s protest against Schenley Industries.⁴⁶

Figure 2. Marshall Ganz (on left in white hat, carrying a clipboard) overseeing the Delano to Sacramento march, March 1966. Photo by Jon Lewis. Courtesy of the Farmworker Movement Documentation Project, http://www.farmworkermovement.org.

The march began on March 17, 1966, the day after the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Farm Labor held hearings in Delano, with sixty-eight farmworkers and NFWA staff members, and included Dickie Flowers of SNCC. Over the next twenty-five days, the marchers stopped overnight in nineteen farming communities and passed through many others along the 250-mile route to Sacramento. In each of these places the marchers held public meetings to explain the pilgrimage and the grape strike. At the overnight stops, which the NFWA had carefully selected, association members and other supporters were relied upon to provide food and housing for the marchers. El Malcriado noted that this was also calculated to demonstrate the widespread support for the farmworkers: “There is, contrary to public opinion, a community of farm workers—for the marchers never lacked food, shelter, or moral support.” Allies also demonstrated their support by marching with the farmworkers for a day or two when they passed through their towns. Throughout the march, the NFWA emphasized the importance of multiracial unity. The union proclaimed in the Plan of Delano, the march’s official statement of purpose, “We know that the poverty of the Mexican or Filipino worker in California is the same as that of all farm workers across the country, the Negroes and poor whites, the Puerto Ricans, Japanese, and Arabians; in short, all of the races that comprise the oppressed minorities of the United States.”⁴⁷

Although the farmworkers were the heart and soul of the march, the collective organizing experience of the SNCC volunteers proved essential to the success of the march. Riding the length of the march in a panel truck equipped with a typewriter and a primitive version of a wireless telephone, Terry Cannon issued press releases and handled press relations to promote the march and boycott, but despite his efforts the march initially received little attention outside California. “When we started, I couldn’t get anyone. Nobody was interested. Nobody cared,” Cannon recalled. SNCC was one of the few organizations that supported the march from the beginning. In addition to the work of Ganz, Miller, and Cannon, SNCC and Friends of SNCC groups lent assistance to the march by raising money and donating supplies. For example, the Marin Friends of SNCC raised $200 for the NFWA, which the union used to purchase shoes and sleeping bags for the marchers. Other SNCC chapters collected food and clothing, while members of various California Friends of SNCC groups marched themselves. Elizabeth Sutherland Martínez, head of the New York SNCC office and one of two Mexican Americans on the SNCC staff nationwide, traveled to California to participate in the march. At the conclusion of the march, Hardy Frye gave a speech on the Capitol steps that explicitly connected the NFWA to SNCC and the civil rights movement by comparing Governor Brown’s refusal to meet with the marchers to Alabama Governor George Wallace’s refusal to meet with those who marched from Selma to Montgomery in 1965.⁴⁸

Figure 3. George Ballis gets his feet tended to on a stop along the march to Sacramento, March 1966. Ballis had been photographing the march. Photo by John Kouns. Courtesy of the Farmworker Movement Documentation Project, http://www.farmworkermovement.org.

The NFWA march from Delano to Sacramento in spring 1966 was a tremendous success. The march and boycott damaged Schenley’s public image. Moreover, since all aspects of Schenley were unionized except for its vineyards, executives worried about the consequences for its relationships with other unions. Therefore, days before the conclusion of the march, Schenley Industries agreed to recognize the NFWA as the union representing its field workers and signed a contract granting a pay increase of 35 cents an hour and union control of hiring. As a result, the union ended its boycott of Schenley products. The march was also successful in that the spectacle of the march itself eventually captured the attention of the national media. Cannon recalled that national news outlets that had ignored the march at the beginning were frantically calling him, begging for an interview with Chavez, as the marchers neared Sacramento. He observed, “I think more than any . . . single event, I think [the march] transformed the relationship of the strike and the union to the rest of the world and it was amazing to watch it happen. So by the time we crossed the bridge, with ten thousand people or however many people there were, it was a national event.”⁴⁹

* * *

While SNCC was intimately involved in the Schenley boycott and Delano to Sacramento march, none of the other major civil rights organizations participated in the protests. The West Coast branches of the NAACP were stymied by their organization’s national headquarters in their efforts to support the farmworkers. The Portland branch of the NAACP attempted to issue a resolution in support of the NFWA two days after the beginning of the march, but the NAACP national headquarters prevented this. Because the resolution included a pledge to urge NAACP members to boycott Schenley, the branch president requested approval from NAACP executive director Roy Wilkins. Wilkins did not respond until three weeks later, after the march had concluded and three days after Schenley signed the agreement to recognize the NFWA. In his belated response, Wilkins recommended that the Portland NAACP send a letter to Schenley “commending Schenley for having recognized the union.”⁵⁰

Wilkins refused to allow NAACP branches to support the NFWA because he enjoyed a close relationship with Schenley Industries. Early in 1965, Schenley’s founder donated $50,000 to the NAACP, the largest single gift to the organization up to that time. One of Wilkins’s advisors recalled, “Wilkins was stunned and almost lost his voice in expressing his appreciation.” Schenley also attempted to curry favor with the black community by giving scholarships to African American students and donating large amounts of money to black-owned banks and businesses. When the NFWA ended its boycott of Schenley products in April 1966, Wilkins issued a press release—drafted by the corporation—congratulating Schenley for resolving the strike:

It is not surprising that the first company in its industry to promote a Negro to an important executive position is also the first company to recognize the legitimate grievances of transient California farm laborers, most of whom are members of minority groups. We commend Schenley Industries, Inc., for signing the union agreement that opens the door to further advancement for the California grape pickers. Schenley’s cooperation in California is an omen of hope and progress for migrant farm workers for whose welfare the NAACP has campaigned on the east as well as the west coast of the nation.

At no point did Wilkins congratulate Chavez and the NFWA.⁵¹

Schenley Industries also used its connections in the black community in an attempt to hinder any potential support for the NFWA from SCLC. Two days before the NFWA began the Delano to Sacramento march, Jackie Robinson, who was the brother-in-law of Schenley vice-president Charles T. Williams and who had been hired to do public relations for Schenley, sent a telegram to Martin Luther King, Jr., asking him to meet with Williams regarding the boycott. Robinson wrote, “I think there are some facts you would like to know which shows both sides of the situation.” It is unclear whether the NFWA or its allies had reached out to King to support the farmworkers’ cause, but Schenley was concerned enough about the potential consequences of his endorsement that the company dispatched Robinson. It is unknown whether King ever met with Williams, but King did not issue a statement in support of the march and did not urge SCLC members to boycott Schenley products, despite his own use of the boycott as an instrument of social change.⁵²

Schenley’s ability to influence the national leadership of the NAACP, and perhaps SCLC, was indicative of the importance of corporate ties and donations to middle-class civil rights organizations. The national leadership of the NAACP felt that it was more important to support Schenley Industries than to mobilize on behalf of its exploited workers because of the economic contributions the company could make to the black community. In contrast, SNCC activists were deeply concerned about the plight of workers and were disinterested in cultivating corporate support. Not only did they organize among the rural poor, but many SNCC staff members were themselves of working-class backgrounds. Those SNCC staff members from middle-class backgrounds had rejected middle-class values by dropping out of school and leaving lucrative career paths to work for the organization full time. According to political scientist Emily Stoper, “Other black-advancement groups had tried to secure for their clientele the privileges and amenities of the white middle class; SNCC rejected the middle-class life-style as empty and immoral.” Consequently, when the black middle class engaged in civil rights activism, they gravitated to the NAACP and SCLC. In contrast, SNCC chose to work on behalf of the powerless poor, who they saw as marginalized by American society and most in need of organizing. SNCC staff members and volunteers embodied their rejection of the middle class by abandoning the suits, ties, dresses, and cardigans that were the uniform of the sit-ins in favor of overalls and jeans, which they felt united them with the people they attempted to organize. SNCC field secretaries were also able to personally relate to impoverished people because they earned less than ten dollars per week and supplemented their meager earnings by living communally or in the homes of local residents.⁵³

The spartan lifestyle of SNCC field secretaries epitomized what Chavez thought of as proper for NFWA organizers. In fact, Chavez believed that such sacrifices contributed to the morality of the cause. He explained, “It’s beautiful to give up material things that take up your time, for the sake of time to help your fellow human beings.” NFWA organizers were therefore paid five dollars per week, with food and housing provided by the union. However, like in SNCC, organizers’ meager pay was augmented by contributions from supporters and the farmworkers themselves. Chavez recalled that when he asked Dolores Huerta to leave her job to become a full-time organizer for the fledging union, she asked him how they would eat and he replied that he did not know: “And I didn’t know. But as we later found out, somebody in the Cause would never starve. The people would never let you.” The NFWA and SNCC were therefore further united in their mutual commitment to selfsacrifice for the greater good.⁵⁴

SNCC’s rejection of middle-class values such as lucrative employment and material comforts was more than a mere act of youthful rebellion. Historian Howard Zinn argued, “They are not playing; it is no casual act of defiance, no irresponsible whim of adolescence, when young people of sixteen or twenty or twenty-five turn away from school, job, family, all the tokens of success in modern America, to take up new lives, hungry and hunted, in the hinterland of the Deep South.” By rejecting middle-class values, SNCC was free to openly confront economic inequality. This differentiated SNCC from the NAACP and SCLC, whose leaders were from the middle and upper classes and who sought middle-class gains for African Americans. Although SNCC initially joined the NAACP and SCLC in fighting for the integration of restaurants, schools, and public spaces, its members quickly realized that these achievements were of little value for a constituency that was trapped by their lack of economic and political power.⁵⁵

SNCC’s emphasis on economic oppression enabled the organization to pursue equality for all poor people, not just African Americans. Once the barrier of class was eliminated, it was easier for SNCC to then bridge the racial divide because it could recognize the commonalities between poor people of all races and apply its principles and organizational praxis to a freedom struggle that did not involve African Americans in the Deep South. This resulted in the productive and successful coalition that formed between SNCC and the NFWA, which contributed to the farmworkers’ victory over Schenley Industries. As Hardy Frye explained, “To work with the farm workers was like an extension of what we had already been doing.” This coalition was also due to the understanding of Chavez and others in the NFWA that while the Mexican American farmworkers were discriminated against based on their race, all agricultural workers were economically oppressed. The union therefore championed multiracial equality, enabling it to find common cause with the civil rights movement. The shared commitment to fighting both racial and class inequality was the basis of the alliance between the two organizations, but it was strengthened by their similar organizing strategies and nonviolent resistance.⁵⁶