To March for Others

The Black Freedom Struggle and the United Farm Workers

Lauren Araiza

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780812208832
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Nordamerikanische Geschichte

In 1966, members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, an African American civil rights group with Southern roots, joined Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Workers union on its 250-mile march from Delano to Sacramento, California, to protest the exploitation of agricultural workers. SNCC was not the only black organization to support the UFW: later on, the NAACP, the National Urban League, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Black Panther Party backed UFW strikes and boycotts against California agribusiness throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. To March for Others explores the reasons why black activists, who were committed to their own fight for equality during this period, crossed racial, socioeconomic, geographic, and ideological divides to align themselves with a union of predominantly Mexican American farm workers in rural California. Lauren Araiza considers the history, ideology, and political engagement of these five civil rights organizations, representing a broad spectrum of African American activism, and compares their attitudes and approaches to multiracial coalitions. Through their various relationships with the UFW, Araiza examines the dynamics of race, class, labor, and politics in twentieth-century freedom movements. The lessons in this eloquent and provocative study apply to a broader understanding of political and ethnic coalition building in the contemporary United States.

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, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. This Is How a Movement Begins
• Chapter 2. To Wage Our Own War of Liberation
• Chapter 3. Consumers Who Understand Hunger and Joblessness
• Chapter 4. More Mutual Respect than Ever in Our History
• Chapter 5. A Natural Alliance of Poor People
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Acknowledgments