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CHAPTER 2

To Wage Our Own War of Liberation

Following the NFWA victory over Schenley Industries, journalist John Gregory Dunne asked veteran organizer Saul Alinsky what he would have done differently had he been in charge of the strike in Delano’s grape fields. Alinsky, head of the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), was the virtual godfather to the NFWA. In 1947 he hired Fred Ross to organize Mexican Americans in Los Angeles, which led to Ross’s discovery and cultivation of Cesar Chavez as a farmworker organizer. Furthermore, Alinsky’s model of community organizing served as the blueprint for the organizing philosophy of SNCC’s Mike Miller, who initiated the alliance between the civil rights organization and the union. Alinsky recognized the importance of the SNCC/ NFWA alliance, but with significant reservations. He told Dunne, “The farm workers aren’t going to win this by themselves. When the SNCC kids and the civil-rights people leave, you’re back on page 27 of the newspaper. The money tree stops and who cares.” Alinsky, the master strategist, was prophetic: a year later, the once productive relationship between the two organizations was over. Although SNCC’s departure did not spell the end of the NFWA, as Alinsky had foretold, it did reveal the limits of multiracial coalition building.¹

SNCC and NFWA organizers had developed an alliance based on their mutual recognition that African Americans and Mexican Americans experienced similar, intertwined forms of economic exploitation and racial discrimination. They built on these shared experiences of inequality to craft an ideology and praxis that prioritized cross-racial solidarity and cooperation in the pursuit of social change. The organizers believed that by working together and supporting each other, both organizations could more effectively reduce the power of agribusiness, which maintained racial inequities in order to continue to exploit the most vulnerable workers. Accordingly, SNCC organizers believed that supporting the NFWA by participating in picket lines, boycotting a liquor company, or donating food and supplies fit into their broader goal of pursuing racial equality and economic justice for all. Although these coalition politics resulted in an alliance that achieved significant victories for the farmworkers, racial unity proved insufficient in sustaining it. As SNCC evolved, its thinking on racial identity, discrimination, and cross-racial solidarity changed dramatically, which led the organization to shift its priorities to emphasizing race over class rather than addressing the two in tandem. These changes not only caused significant changes within SNCC, but led to the dissolution of its relationship with the NFWA. Furthermore, as the union grew and developed, its ideals, goals, and strategies became incompatible with SNCC’s new direction.²

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Conflicts over race arose within SNCC as early as 1964 during the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, when hundreds of primarily northern white college students went to Mississippi to conduct voter registration among African Americans in rural areas. Disagreements over the purpose of the project, the impact of white volunteers on local black leadership, and interracial relationships caused deep divisions within SNCC. Continued violence directed against African Americans and SNCC volunteers compounded these tensions. Many in SNCC began to question the value of their work, the practicality of depending on white allies and, in some cases, the wisdom of working with whites at all. As a result, many black SNCC staff members began to consider dismissing white SNCC workers. Initially, however, distance shielded the San Francisco SNCC office—which included several whites—from these conflicts, allowing SNCC members in California to focus on issues of economic inequality, rather than being distracted by the debate over black separatism that began disrupting SNCC’s organizing in the South. Furthermore, by working with the NFWA, SNCC was able to continue to apply the organizing principles on which the organization was founded.³

Immediately following the victorious Delano to Sacramento march, SNCC organizers continued to work alongside the NFWA in its battles with Delano’s grape growers. Four days after the conclusion of the march, the union turned its attention to the DiGiorgio Corporation, the largest of the Delano grape growers that had been struck by the NFWA since September 1965. On April 7, 1966, the day after Schenley Industries recognized the NFWA as the bargaining representative of its grape pickers, DiGiorgio sent letters to Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown, Chavez, and other union leaders informing them that the corporation wanted the California State Mediation and Conciliation Service to conduct elections for union representation on its ranches. While Chavez was in favor of elections, he was adamantly opposed to the conditions that DiGiorgio demanded, including limiting the election to active workers, who were actually scab workers and not the pickers who had previously worked for DiGiorgio. Chavez and the NFWA also objected to DiGiorgio’s stipulation that strikes could not occur during contract negotiations or harvest season. In response to DiGiorgio’s attempts to hem in its workers’ rights to collective bargaining, the NFWA began picketing at DiGiorgio’s Sierra Vista Ranch on April 14. Using the experience gained during the Schenley strike, the NFWA chose to boycott S&W Fine Food and Treesweet Juices, DiGiorgio’s most popular brands, rather than attempt to boycott DiGiorgio grapes.⁴

The NFWA strike and boycott of DiGiorgio had an immediate effect and union officials began meeting with the corporation to negotiate the terms of an election for union representation of its workers. However, in an attempt to circumvent the NFWA, DiGiorgio began meeting with the International Brotherhood of Teamsters regarding union representation of the farmworkers. DiGiorgio welcomed the intervention of the Teamsters, an overwhelmingly white union that did not truly represent the farmworkers and had no qualms about agreeing to no-strike clauses in its contracts. The company agreed to an election for union representation on the condition that the Teamsters appear on the ballot and then attempted to rig it by restricting organizing on its ranches solely to the Teamsters. The NFWA urged workers to abstain from the fraudulent election and established picket lines around the Sierra Vista Ranch, shouting, “No voten viernes” (“Do not vote Friday”). On the day of the election, June 24, only 84 of 219 eligible workers voted; the few who did so voted for the Teamsters.⁵

SNCC staff members organized many of the protest activities against DiGiorgio. For example, Marshall Ganz and Dickie Flowers recruited African Americans from Bakersfield to join a vigil outside the home of the Rev. R. B. Moore, the African American minister of St. Paul’s Baptist Church in Delano and “the only Negro in the Delano Kiwanis Club.” Moore was to observe the DiGiorgio election and had spoken out against the NFWA by arguing that farmworkers did not suffer discrimination and that “Delano had the best race relations in America.” Ganz, along with organizer Eliseo Medina, also conducted house meetings to educate farmworkers on the issues of the election. Additionally, SNCC co-sponsored the NFWA Student Summer Project. Based on SNCC’s Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, the Student Summer Project brought together eighty students from activist groups such as the National Student Association, Students for a Democratic Society, and Young Christian Students to work for the NFWA from June through August 1966.⁶

Friends of SNCC chapters also continued to support the NFWA by organizing food caravans and hosting fundraisers. For example, the College of Marin Friends of SNCC held two screenings of the movie Salt of the Earth, about the Mexican American copper miners’ strike in New Mexico in the 1950s, with all proceeds going to the NFWA. In thanking the College of Marin Friends of SNCC, Chavez applauded the choice of the movie and stated, “We hope that you will continue to work beside us in the coming months.” Due in part to public pressure, including that from SNCC and other progressive groups, DiGiorgio agreed to conduct new elections for union representation of its workers supervised by the American Arbitration Association and with rules agreed on by the NFWA. In turn, the NFWA ceased picketing at DiGiorgio ranches and called off the boycott of DiGiorgio products. At the August 30 election at DiGiorgio’s Sierra Vista and Borrego Springs ranches, 530 field workers voted for the NFWA, 331 for the Teamsters, and 7 for no union representation.⁷

Despite the momentum generated by another SNCC-supported NFWA victory, the decision of the NFWA to officially merge with the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee to form the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, AFL-CIO (UFWOC) in August 1966 threatened this productive alliance. Chavez and AWOC leader Larry Itliong believed that the merger was necessary because it created a united front between the two farmworker unions and enabled both to receive financial and logistical support from the AFL-CIO. Moreover, after the long battles against Schenley and DiGiorgio, the NFWA was cash-strapped and had only one foreseeable option—to join AWOC and the AFL-CIO. However, months before the merger, farmworkers and activists worried that the AFL-CIO bureaucracy would kill the farmworkers’ movement. One NFWA staff member asked, “If the AFL is so damn great, why couldn’t they organize the workers?” Marshall Ganz, however, was more practical: “I think it’s inevitable. . . . The Association doesn’t stand a chance in competition with the big money unions. The AFL-CIO could kill us by throwing millions of dollars into an organizing campaign. It has nothing to do with how good an organization they are. We have to join them.” This did not sit well with SNCC and others on the left because it appeared that the independent NFWA was being co-opted “by one of the giant institutions involved in preserving the status-quo in America.” In an analysis of the merger, The Movement declared that despite misgivings about the AFL-CIO, SNCC should still support the UFWOC because of “the justice of the cause itself.”⁸

The Movement’s statement on the merger reflects the complicated nature of the civil rights movement’s relationship with organized labor. Civil rights and labor activism shared many commonalities, especially in terms of organizing and protest strategies, guiding ethos, government response, and violent opposition. At a conference of the United Packinghouse Workers of America (UPWA), Congress of Racial Equality executive director James Farmer pointed out that those opposed to civil rights were also in favor of “right-to-work” laws, which greatly limited the power of unions. Moreover, some union members viewed the achievement of racial equality as “a necessary precondition for economic and political equality.” Many labor unions were therefore supportive of the civil rights movement. Unions frequently staged sympathy protests around the country in response to civil rights demonstrations in the South, including one organized by the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) in San Francisco that drew around 30,000 people in solidarity with the protestors who had been blasted with fire hoses in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Unions also frequently donated money to civil rights organizations, including SNCC. For example, the AFL-CIO funded SNCC’s founding meeting in April 1960 and issued public statements in support of Mississippi Freedom Summer. The ILWU, Packinghouse Workers, United Electrical Workers (UE), and other unions made financial contributions to several SNCC projects. SNCC organizer Ekwueme Michael Thelwell recalled after receiving a significant donation from representatives of the UE, “Two class-conscious workers—and a strong union—are worth a thousand students.”⁹

Labor’s support of the civil rights movement came only from northern unions, however. Southern unions did not offer support to SNCC or other civil rights organizations and occasionally donated to segregationist organizations instead. Numerous polls confirmed that southern white workers overwhelmingly did not support the struggle for black equality. In addition to their antagonistic relationship with southern unions, many in SNCC were wary of the compromises that came with northern unions’ support. For example, in October 1960 SNCC held a second conference in Atlanta, partly funded by a grant from the UPWA, to establish itself as a permanent organization. The union threatened to withhold the money unless Bayard Rustin, a noted civil rights activist and advisor to Martin Luther King, Jr., was disinvited as a keynote speaker. Rustin had formerly been a member of the American Communist Party, and therefore the UPWA—reflecting the liberal anticommunism of organized labor during the Cold War and attempting to distance themselves from the historical communist influence within the union—believed he was an “inappropriate” choice. SNCC field secretary Cleveland Sellers wrote in his autobiography that “the students decided that they needed the Packinghouse Workers’ grant more than they needed to hear Bayard Rustin.” Although SNCC acceded to the union’s demand and disinvited Rustin, Sellers noted that many conference participants later regretted this decision. This event also planted the seed of distrust for organized labor among those in SNCC, despite the Packinghouse Workers’ continued donations of bail money, food, and even college scholarships. James Forman, who later became SNCC’s executive secretary, reflected in his autobiography that the Packinghouse Workers’ “success in preventing Rustin from speaking must have suggested that it was indeed possible to influence if not control the student movement.”¹⁰

Forman’s reservations about organized labor were reflected in his perceptions of the March on Washington in August 1963. The march was originally conceived of by black trade unionists and coordinated by Rustin and A. Philip Randolph, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, to draw attention to the economic inequality experienced by African Americans, particularly in rates of unemployment, and its connection to racial discrimination. Despite the fact that unions took the lead in providing logistical and financial support for the march, Forman remained deeply suspicious of the involvement of organized labor. He recalled, “Everywhere there were large groups from labor unions and especially the United Automobile Workers, all with prominent signs. We had asked them for financial help and they refused. We felt that not only the UAW, but many other so-called liberal forces were shamming and this was just another march.” Forman was particularly wary of UAW president Walter Reuther, who had helped convince organizers not to incorporate direct action protests into the march and who later joined the planning committee mere weeks before the march occurred. But for many civil rights activists, Reuther’s participation was less troubling than AFL-CIO president George Meany’s refusal to endorse the march at all. Meany did not support it both because he was concerned that such a demonstration would lead to additional charges of communist influence in the labor movement and, as a member of an all-white plumber’s union, he opposed “any hiring preferences for blacks that might undermine union seniority systems.”¹¹

SNCC’s relationship with organized labor was further strained during the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) attempt to unseat their state’s regular delegation at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City in

1964. The MFDP was formed during Freedom Summer and represented an alternative to the segregationist Mississippi Democrats, who systematically disenfranchised black voters. According to historian Clayborne Carson, “The hopes of the MFDP delegation were based on the belief that they, rather than the regular, all-white delegation, represented the expressed principles of the national Democratic party.” Moreover, the MFDP supported the election of Lyndon Johnson, as opposed to the regular Mississippi Democratic Party, who actually supported Republican candidate Barry Goldwater. Regardless, Johnson was determined to not alienate white southern Democrats and thus did not want the MFDP to be seated. Johnson’s forces therefore offered the MFDP two at-large seats, with the rest of the delegation as “guests” of the convention. The MFDP refused the compromise and viewed the entire situation as a betrayal by the Democratic Party leadership, including its allies in organized labor, especially those who had originally supported seating the MFDP and then urged them to accept the compromise. Stokely Carmichael later reflected,

The lesson, in fact, was clear at Atlantic City. The major moral of that experience was not merely that the national conscience was unreliable but that, very specifically, black people in Mississippi and throughout this country could not rely on their so-called allies. Many labor, liberal and civil rights leaders deserted the MFDP because of closer ties to the national Democratic party.

Following the convention, SNCC began to question the wisdom of working with the Democratic Party, which was not seen as representing the interests of African Americans. By extension, organized labor was increasingly not viewed as sincere in its support of the civil rights movement.¹²

Thus by the time that SNCC formed an alliance with the NFWA in 1965, the civil rights organization was already becoming disenchanted with labor unions. It was therefore due to the pioneering work of SNCC field secretaries like Mike Miller and George Ballis, whose ties to organized labor predated their civil rights activism, that the alliance with the farmworkers even occurred. Miller later explained,

I grew up with the idea that unions were a good thing. Nothing in my college education or the student movement persuaded me otherwise. At the same time, as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (and I) learned in the civil rights movement, most of organized labor was deeply intertwined with the Democratic Party’s established leadership.

Miller therefore believed that a careful “balancing act” was required in working with organized labor, but that doing so was worthwhile. The NFWA also alleviated SNCC’s reservations about organized labor by having conceptualized itself as a movement connected to other crusades for social change, making it far more palatable to SNCC than a union.¹³

The NFWA’s identity as both a union and a social movement caused considerable tension among members, supporters, growers, and fellow unions. In response to writer Eugene Nelson’s question about whether the NFWA strike was a civil rights issue, a volunteer explained, “Of course it’s a civil rights issue. Civil rights means equality of opportunity. . . . And farm workers don’t have equality of opportunity.” It was that line of reasoning that caused activists of the New Left to flock to support the NFWA. But this identity also caused problems for the farmworkers. White officials in AWOC at first resisted working with the NFWA because of its movement-centered identity and links to civil rights organizations. Chavez explained, “They just couldn’t make us out. . . . The NFWA didn’t speak the proper language, you know, worker solidarity, the union above all.” The Teamsters felt justified in representing field workers because they believed that the NFWA was not a legitimate union. Teamster official William Grami proclaimed, “They’re not even a union. They’re a civil rights organization.” Growers were alarmed by the NFWA’s popularity as a movement, prompting one to declare, “This isn’t a strike, it’s a revolution.” But despite the NFWA’s efforts to position la causa as a movement and the willingness of others to view it as such, it was still a labor union whose most basic goal was representation of its workers. By joining the AFL-CIO, the NFWA made it more difficult for SNCC to think of it as a social justice movement rather than part of organized labor. As one NFWA volunteer told John Gregory Dunne, “The romance is gone.”¹⁴

Although SNCC was critical of the NFWA for joining the AFL-CIO to become the UFWOC, it continued to support and assist the union in its struggles with Delano grape growers. Soon after the victorious DiGiorgio election, workers at A. Perelli-Minetti & Sons, almost all of whom were UFWOC members, went on strike September 9, 1966 to obtain wages and benefits similar to those guaranteed in the union’s contract with Schenley Industries. Perelli-Minetti was a small wine grape grower in Delano that was not struck in September 1965 because it did not grow table grapes. The forty-eight workers asked the UFWOC to represent them in negotiations with the growers and the union immediately agreed. SNCC was intimately involved in these negotiations; Marshall Ganz and Dolores Huerta met with the owners of Perelli-Minetti and proposed an election for union recognition. Less than a week later, while the UFWOC waited for Perelli-Minetti to decide on its proposal, the Teamsters crossed the picket line to sign a “sweetheart” contract (one more beneficial to the employer than to the workers) with the ranch. The involvement of the Teamsters served to escalate, rather than end, the conflict between Perelli-Minetti and the UFWOC. Although the striking workers numbered fewer than fifty, the UFWOC decided that it had to act in order to prevent the Teamsters from establishing a solid foothold in the grape-growing industry. Consequently, the UFWOC declared a nationwide boycott of Perelli-Minetti products on September 20.¹⁵

Although the Perelli-Minetti strike was gaining momentum, the boycott could not get underway for another two months. The labor dispute with DiGiorgio had not been completely resolved, and because of the UFWOC’s limited resources the union could not afford to be involved in both conflicts at the same time. The issue at hand was now DiGiorgio’s Arvin Ranch in Bakersfield, which had not previously been struck. Most Arvin workers had wanted elections the previous August, during the early harvest season, but DiGiorgio refused. The Arvin workers therefore pushed for elections in October during another peak in harvesting and before many migrant workers left to work in other areas. SNCC was particularly helpful in organizing the workers at Arvin for the UFWOC because many were African American or white migrants. Mack Lyons, an African American farmworker who had been recruited to the union by SNCC members Ganz and Dickie Flowers, was elected to represent the Arvin workers to the company. In recruiting Lyons, Flowers and Ganz succeeded in applying SNCC’s organizing principles of identifying and cultivating local leadership.¹⁶

Figure 4. DiGiorgio workers line up to register to vote in the election for union representation. Photo by Jon Lewis. Courtesy of the Farmworker Movement Documentation Project, http://www.farmworkermovement.org.

SNCC was also involved when UFWOC organizers, including Lyons, traveled to DiGiorgio’s San Francisco headquarters to personally demand that company President Robert DiGiorgio agree to an election. The protest at DiGiorgio headquarters revealed that the relationship between the union and SNCC was still quite close. While UFWOC organizers waited inside to meet with DiGiorgio, a picket line of over 200 supporters marched outside the building and El Teatro Campesino, a theater group affiliated with the UFWOC, performed strike songs. During the demonstration someone unfurled a sixty-two-foot banner from the roof of the building that employed a SNCC slogan: “DiGiorgio—One Man One Vote—Workers Demand Elections.” Inside, police arrested Terry Cannon, editor of The Movement, along with Lyons and six UFWOC and AFL-CIO officials for entering the DiGiorgio offices and refusing to leave until they were granted a meeting with the president of the corporation. The arrests of Cannon and the labor leaders were broadcast from San Francisco stations on that evening’s news. Rather than risk additional bad press, DiGiorgio agreed to an election when UFWOC organizers returned to the DiGiorgio offices the next morning (including those arrested, who had posted bail). The next day the Teamsters announced it would withdraw from the Arvin election. On November 4 the UFWOC won the right to represent the Arvin workers and negotiate a contract on their behalf. SNCC participation in the demonstration at DiGiorgio headquarters was crucial to this victory, as was its success in organizing African American farmworkers at Arvin. Huerta later asserted, “We wouldn’t have won the Arvin election if it hadn’t been for the Okie and black votes.”¹⁷

With the victory at DiGiorgio’s Arvin ranch, the UFWOC could proceed against Perelli-Minetti. Beginning in November, the union called for boycotts of Tribuno Vermouth, Eleven Cellars Brandy, and other Perelli-Minetti products. The Teamsters attempted to mobilize a counteroffensive in response to the boycott, but they were unable to rally the kind of support that the farmworkers had from SNCC and other progressive activists. According to Ganz, “For many in the cities, for whom the grape strike had been framed as the struggle of an ‘oppressed minority fighting for its freedom,’ the Teamsters were a powerful and corrupt white union conspiring with powerful white growers to deny the rights of powerless earnest Mexican farm workers.” The Teamsters’ violent behavior toward farmworkers and their supporters, such as the beating of UFWOC organizer Eliseo Medina during the DiGiorgio campaign, strengthened this image. This dynamic of the minority farmworkers versus white growers and Teamsters demonstrated the parallels between the UFWOC’s struggle and that of African Americans; it also facilitated SNCC staff members’ continued support of the union’s fight against racial discrimination and economic oppression. Therefore, SNCC expressed support for the union and participated in its boycott of Perelli-Minetti products in New York, Chicago, and Milwaukee. The boycott proved so financially damaging that Perelli-Minetti signed a contract with the UFWOC in July 1967.¹⁸

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The multiracial solidarity that characterized SNCC’s protest activities against DiGiorgio and Perelli-Minetti became increasingly limited to the San Francisco SNCC office and its supporters. These organizers remained committed to multiracial solidarity and cooperation. Moreover, their understanding of the link between racial discrimination and economic exploitation enabled them to recognize that the Mexican American farmworkers had much in common with African Americans in the Deep South. However, shifts in ideology, priorities, and tactics among SNCC’s other members eventually destroyed its alliance with the UFWOC. For those in SNCC whose ideas about race were becoming increasingly nationalistic and separatist, the fact that the organization’s alliance with the farmworkers was cross-racial made it untenable.¹⁹

The evolution of SNCC’s ideology occurred within broader developments in the black freedom struggle. Some black activists and intellectuals, particularly in the urban North, rejected (or at least questioned) the integrationist goals of the southern civil rights movement. They believed that integration privileged whiteness by demanding proximity to it and did not result in true equality for African Americans through the sharing of resources and power. Moreover, the massive white resistance to the desegregation of schools and public accommodations in the South demonstrated that the complete incorporation of African Americans into American institutions was unfeasible. Rather, the common experience of racism proved that African Americans (and all people of African descent throughout the diaspora) were part of a distinct black “nation” with common issues and struggles. Black nationalist and minister in the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, explained in 1963 in his speech, “Message to the Grassroots,”

What you and I need to do is learn to forget our differences. When we come together, we don’t come together as Baptists or Methodists. You don’t catch hell ’cause you’re a Baptist, and you don’t catch hell ’cause you’re a Methodist. . . . You don’t catch hell because you’re a Democrat or a Republican. You don’t catch hell because you’re a Mason or an Elk. And you sure don’t catch hell ’cause you’re an American; ’cause if you was an American, you wouldn’t catch no hell. You catch hell ’cause you’re a black man. You catch hell, all of us catch hell, for the same reason.

Although there was much variation among black nationalists, they shared ideals of black pride, racial unity, and self-determination. Some black nationalists, in developing a positive conception of “blackness” as the center of community identity, called for racial separatism as a more empowering alternative to integration. As such, multiracial coalition building was an impractical and unappealing strategy for racial separatists.²⁰