Dorothy Day, legendary founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, offered crucial support to Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers at several key junctures in their struggle. Most memorably, she travelled to California in the summer of 1973 to get arrested. The UFW, in the midst of a bitter struggle with the Teamsters union, had begun a campaign of […]
Forty-seven years ago today, Robert F. Kennedy went to Delano, California to help Cesar Chavez break his first and most famous lengthy fast. Speculation was rampant about whether the junior senator from New York would enter the Democratic presidential primary, a contest where, at the moment, President Lyndon Johnson faced a challenge from the left from Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy. On […]
Tomorrow, March 10, is the anniversary of the day that Cesar Chavez broke his first and most famous fast, in 1968. That ceremony produced what may be the most iconic photo of Chavez from that era, breaking his 25-day fast with Sen. Robert F. Kennedy. (More on RFK and Chavez tomorrow, but here’s a link to a post […]
Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” is the source of many famous quotes and aphorisms, including the paraphrase of a line from Polonius that we have come to know as the saying, “clothes make the man.” Cesar Chavez, who left school after 8th grade, had likely not discovered Shakespeare when the 25-year-old discovered his lifelong passion: community organizing. But he instinctively […]
Cesar Chavez and Martin Luther King Jr. never met. They overlapped only briefly in the national spotlight, though their names are often linked together because of they each championed civil rights and shared a very public commitment to non-violent protest. When John Lewis led marchers across the Edmund Pettus bridge on Bloody Sunday, fifty years ago today, […]
Since I’m heading to New York soon (two great events – March 31 at the 92nd St Y and April 1 at the new Book Culture on Columbus Ave), today’s #chaveztrivia is about the New York City “Boycott House.” As a native New Yorker and a baby boomer, I’m well aware that most New Yorkers of a certain […]
March 31, Cesar Chavez’s birthday, is a state holiday in California, and President Obama regularly issues a proclamation of a national day of service. The intent of the 2000 law in California was not only to honor Chavez, but to draw attention to the life of this remarkable man, and in particular to educate students. There’s a long way to go. Sadly, I’ve […]
The 27-year-old just stared at the photo of the young girl. Jose Barreto’s mother is 50; he had never seen a picture of her as a child. Now through a combination of chance and history and complicated threads, he sat in an El Centro kitchen, looking back four decades at a picture of a 10-year-old girl. […]
Thirty years ago next week, Cesar Chavez delivered one of his most memorable addresses, a speech to the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco. Ronald Ronald Reagan had just been re-elected president in a landslide. The United Farm Workers union that Chavez had founded two decades earlier had lost most of its contracts and was in […]
Gov. Jerry Brown has a long, significant history as an advocate of farmworkers’ rights, dating back to his early marches with Cesar Chavez in the late 1960s and culminating with the passage in May 1975 of the Agricultural Labor Relations Act, the only law in the country protecting farmworkers’ rights to unionize. The law would […]