César Chávez was born 80 years ago today.
Blending the nonviolent resistance of Gandhi with the organizational skills of his mentor, the social activist Saul Alinsky, Mr. Chavez captured worldwide attention in the 1960’s. Leading an initially lonely battle to unionize the fields and orchards of California, he issued a call to boycott grapes that soon became a cause celebre.
Mr. Chavez, who was described by Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 as “one of the heroic figures of our time,” was widely acknowledged to have done more to improve the lot of the migrant farm worker than anyone else.
Fighting growers and shippers who for generations had defeated efforts to unionize field workers, and later fighting rival unionists, Mr. Chavez for the first time brought a degree of stability and security to the lives of some migrant workers.
Above from the 1993 obituary in The New York Times, which also had this:
Cesar Estrada Chavez was born on March 31, 1927, near Yuma, Ariz., the second of five children of Juana and Librado Chavez. His father’s parents migrated from Mexico in 1880.
His early years were spent on the family’s 160-acre farm. But in the seventh year of the Depression, when he was 10, the family fell behind on mortgage payments and lost its farm.
Along with thousands of other families in the Southwest, they sought a new life in California. They found it picking carrots, cotton and other crops in arid valleys, following the sun in search of the next harvest and the next migrants’ camp.
Mr. Chavez never graduated from high school, and once counted 65 elementary schools he had attended “for a day, a week or a few months.”
Photos from César E Chávez Foundation.