How could you demand equality for your own people when you tolerate prejudice against anyone else because of who they are, he reasoned.Ĭhavez led the UFW in working with disparate groups from the Black Panther Party in Oakland to Neighbor to Neighbor’s international boycott of Salvadoran coffee that helped end the death squads in El Salvador. As early as the mid-1970s, Chavez unequivocally endorsed gay rights, long before it was popular. So during the late 1960s, Chavez and the union strongly opposed the Vietnam War, despite support for the war by many national labor leaders who backed the UFW. They likewise believed the union had to work closely with other communities struggling for change against the slow violence of oppression and poverty. They were convinced the UFW also had to address the crippling dilemmas farm workers faced in their communities such as substandard housing, lack of educational opportunities, and discrimination based on ethnicity and language. Moreover, Chavez and other early UFW organizers embraced a transformational vision of trade unionism that transcended focusing solely on economic improvements-better wages, hours, and working conditions-for union members. We learned righteous protests like boycotting that rely on genuine solidarity among divergent groups of people can move powerful forces, either corporate or governmental. Two key UFW strategies were borrowed from King: nonviolence, which both King and Chavez learned from Mahatma Gandhi, and the boycott, which had never before been applied in a major American labor-management dispute. “We are together with you in spirit and in determination that our dreams for a better tomorrow will be realized.”Ĭhavez carefully followed King’s career beginning with the 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott. “Our separate struggles are really one- a struggle for freedom, for dignity, and for humanity,” King stated. sent a telegram to Cesar Chavez in 1966, early in the five-year-long Delano grape strike.
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