http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_1Rj7DX9v0

The Life and Legacy of Cesar Chavez

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NzbL3X68TEI&feature=related

Kern County Police Violence Against UFW Strikers 1973 Arvin CA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWTvRDoDZEo&feature=related

Farm Work: LA Times Op-Ed by Douglass Adair

 Diva (Digital Information Virtual Archive) / San Francisco State University

1966 Dolores Huerta & Cesar Chavez in Sacramento (March to Sacramento)

1966 Huerta & Chavez in Sacramento Part II (March to Sacramento)

1970 Cesar Chavez Speech In San Rafael

1970 Cesar Chavez On Planning For Salinas Boycott

1970 Chavez Pledges Boycott Will Continue

1970 Chavez Vigil Outside Salinas Jail

1970 Chavez Released From Salinas Jail

1972  Chavez Explains The Need For Boycotts

1972  Cesar Chavez Special KQED

1973  United Farm Workers Boycott Safeway

1973  United Farm Workers Wait For Election Results

1974  Chavez Press Conference On Break-Ins

1974  Chavez On Repressive Strike Breaking Measures

1975  UFW Rally & Chavez Press Conference

1975  United Farm Workers Picket In Fields

1976  Chavez On Covert Operations Against UFW

1976  Chavez Speech On Proposition 14

1977  Teamsters & UFW Unions Sign Agreement

1979  UFW Demonstration Against Chiquita Bananas

1993  Cesar Chavez Funeral/Memorial March

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNJ_6KfnX8k

 Walking the Gauntlet: Bobby Kennedy’s Mission to Delano

 pauldarwinlee | August 02, 2010

Raw television outtakes of New York Senator Robert F. Kennedy arriving Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), where he was compelled to run a gauntlet of reporters before boarding a propeller aircraft for Delano, Calif., March 10, 1968.

WALKING THE GAUNTLET

No sooner had the senator deplaned than he was at the center of a swirling vortex of insistent print, radio and television reporters. In a walking news conference, they peppered Kennedy with questions about his presidential ambitions, if any; whether or not he would support liberal Minnesota Senator Eugene J. McCarthy, an insurgent anti-Vietnam war candidate, or endorse the increasingly unpopular President Lyndon B. Johnson in that year’s Democratic party presidential contest; if he would support Los Angeles Mayor Samuel W. Yorty (who detested Kennedy and had his feelings returned in full measure) in his U. S. Senate bid; and other matters.

However, it was only after Kennedy mentioned his reason for traveling to the small, grape-growing town of Delano in the state’s fertile Central Valley that reporters finally asked him about it.

MISSION TO DELANO

There Kennedy would join an estimated 6,000-10,000 persons, mostly Chicano, or Mexican American, migrant workers, gathered to hold a “Mass of Thanksgiving” at Memorial Park for Cesar E. Chavez, president of the United Farm Workers (UFW), a union seeking to organize migrant farm laborers to improve their wages, education, housing and legal protections, including recognition of the UFW. (For Kennedy’s arrival, see the video “¡Si, Se Puede! (Yes, It Can Be Done!): Bobby Kennedy Supports Cesar Chavez” on this YouTube.com channel).

The diminutive Chavez, who was an admirer and friend of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and, like him, shared a profound commitment to Gandhian nonviolence, was breaking a 25-day “spiritual and penitential fast for nonviolence,” as a UFW statement described the act of the devoutly Catholic Chavez (Associated Press report, Feb. 26, 1968).

“There was demoralization in the ranks, people were becoming desperate, and more and more talk about violence,” Chavez later recalled. “…I thought that I had to … do something that would force them and me to deal with the whole question of violence and ourselves” (Roger Bruns, “Cesar Chavez: A Biography” [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2005], p. 60).

Peter B. Edelman, one of Kennedy’s gifted young legislative aides and speechwriters, was the senator’s point man on migrant worker issues. He could be seen, wearing glasses, beginning at 00:31,1:40 and 2:16.

DECISION TO RUN

In a letter to this channel’s moderator, Edelman recalled that Kennedy “told me, [aides] Ed Guthman, and John Seigenthaler that day, on our way to Delano from Los Angeles, that he had decided to run for President. We had been in Des Moines on the evening of the 9th where Senator Kennedy addressed the Jefferson-Jackson day dinner for that year. I was with him in Iowa because I was the staffer who worked on issues related to Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers. John Seigenthaler met us there and flew on to Los Angeles with us. I thought that was a little odd but didn’t dwell on it. Then Ed Guthman joined us in Los Angeles for the trip up to Delano in a small chartered plane. I thought again that this was a bit odd. On that plane ride RFK told the three of us that he had decided to run.

“This is very important because the impression persists that Kennedy did not decide to run until after the stunning results of the New Hampshire primary on March 12 [in which McCarthy made a strong showing against President Johnson], two days later. I and others have written that RFK told us of his decision two days before the New Hampshire primary (and he had obviously come to that decision sometime before that), but I still encounter accounts … that are incorrect.

“Quite obviously, Kennedy was not about to share his decision with anyone but us on that day, but it is especially interesting to look at the footage in light of the knowledge that he had already decided to run for President.

With regards to the press gauntlets, Edelman added, “They were a bit silly but understandable and not inappropriate” (Peter Edelman email letter to Paul Lee, Sept. 5, 2010, 5:34 PM).

NOTE: The moderator would like to thank Peter Edelman, Peter Goldman and UFW spokesperson Marc Grossman for their kind and generous assistance in properly contextualizing this historic video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQndvfZyf7w

 ¡Si, Se Puede! (Yes, It Can Be Done!): Bobby Kennedy Visits Cesar Chavez

 pauldarwinlee | August 02, 2010

Raw television outtakes of Senator Robert F. Kennedy arriving at Delano, Calif., to help United Farm Workers union president Cesar E. Chevaz break his nearly month-long “spiritual and penitential fast for nonviolence,” March 10, 1968. (For background on this visit, see the video “Walking the Gauntlet: Bobby Kennedy’s Mission to Delano-REVISED” on this YouTube.com channel). 

AT KENNEDY’S SIDE

Kennedy was joined by UFW co-founder and vice president Dolores C. Huerta (beginning at 00:47).

Three months later, on the evening of June 4-5, Huerta would share the platform with Kennedy at Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel (now the Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools) when he addressed his ecstatic supporters after winning the California Democratic presidential primary with the strong support of the Chicano, or Mexican American, and “black” communities. After leaving the dais to address a news conference, Kennedy was mortally shot in a pantry and died the following day.

At Delano, Kennedy wore on his left lapel a version of the UFW’s black and red Aztec eagle button (00:45), perhaps given to him by Peter B. Edelman, one of his legislative aides and speechwriters, who was Kennedy’s point man on the UFW’s boycott against table grape growers. “The significance was to show support for Chavez and the work of the UFW,” Edelman explained in a letter to the moderator of this channel (Peter Edelman email letter to Paul Lee, Sept. 6, 2010, 10:05 PM).

¡SI, SE PUEDE! (YES, IT CAN BE DONE) – UFW MOTTO

Edelman, who introduced Kennedy to Chavez, described the farm workers’ struggle and how the senator became involved with it as follows:

“Farmworkers have always been badly paid and the work has always been performed under very bad conditions. Prior to Cesar Chavez, the various sporadic efforts to organize farmworkers into a union had always failed. In 1966 when Kennedy first became aware of Chavez and the United Farm Workers, he was impressed and wanted to know more.

“In March of 1966 he went to California with the Senate Migratory Labor Subcommittee, of which he was a member, for hearings designed to give Chavez and the UFW a national platform and enhance their leverage in organizing against the entrenched and powerful growers. The two men took an instant like to one another and bonded immediately into a close relationship that lasted until RFK’s death. Kennedy became Chavez’s leading advocate in Washington, and the two men and their close associates were in frequent contact.

“Through the efforts of Kennedy and others, the Fair Labor Standards Act was finally amended in 1966 to extend the minimum wage and overtime rules to some of the farmworkers — about 1 percent of the nation’s farms and a third of the country’s farmworkers. …

“Chavez … went on a [fast] in early 1968. His staff was deeply worried that he would die, and that he was gravely at risk of permanent damage to his health. …

“Chavez’s staff got in touch with me and said the only way Chavez would break the fast would be if Kennedy came personally to see Chavez and ask him to resume eating. Kennedy agreed, and that was why he was on his way to Delano on March 10, 1968″ (Edelman to Lee).

RFK ON THE FARM WORKERS

With passion and sincerity, in his typically halting manner, Kennedy spoke in support of Chavez’s attempt to keep the struggle of the farm workers nonviolent:

“I think people are frustrated and I think they’re terribly disturbed by the fact that they haven’t had more success and that the federal government in Washington has not been helpful to them and that the state has not been helpful to them, and this is not only true here, but elsewhere in the country, so that there is this frustration and there is apt to be this explosion.

“I think that Cesar Chavez is very influential, but I think also what in the last analysis is the answer is that we pass the laws that will remedy the injustices. That’s what we should do, that’s what those of us in Washington should do. We shouldn’t just deplore the violence and deplore the lawlessness. We should pass the laws that remedy what people riot about. We can’t have violence in the country, but we should also not have these injustices continue.”

NOTE: The moderator would like to thank Peter Edelman, Peter Goldman and UFW spokesperson Marc Grossman for their kind and generous assistance in properly contextualizing this historic video.

Play trailer: “The Delano Manongs”

Ronald A. Wells is professor of history, emeritus, at Calvin College. He is now mostly retired in Tennessee, where he also directs the annual Symposium on Faith and the Liberal Arts at Maryville College. His most recent publication is, “The Protestant Allies of Cesar Chavez: The California Migrant Ministry and the Farm Worker Movement,” Journal of Presbyterian History (2009).

The official archive for United Farm Workers of America, AFL-CIO is housed at the Reuther Library at Wayne State University in Detroit MI.

As is the case with most academic archives, only a fraction of the archived UFW material is online and therefore accesible by the interested public. This was one of the reasons for the creation of the Farmworker Movement Documentation Project – an online collection of farmworker movement photographs, videos, oral history, essays, memorabilia, graphics, cartoons, etc.

Recently, the Reuther Library has made more than 400 photos available online:

LINK – UFW PHOTOS/REUTHER LIBRARY 

“Delano Diary: The Visual Adventure and Social Documentary Work of Jon Lewis, Photographer of the Delano, California Grape Strike, 1966-1970″.

Reprint from Southern California Quarterly / Volume 91 / Number 2

DR. JEROME LACKNER / DELANO FARM WORKER CLINIC / PHOTO BY GILBERT ORTIZ

 Excerpt From Book Manuscript, “La Causa” by A.V. Krebs 2005 -
Account of Dr. Jerome Lackner’s 1966 Testimony To U.S. Senate Sub-Committee In Delano CA

(Al Krebs, a reporter with Religious News Service, was in Delano to cover the U.S. Senate hearings in 1966).

The last witness to testify before the Senate subcommittee was Dr. Jerome A. Lackner, a physician from San Jose, California, engaged in the practice of internal medicine. Lackner had been one of the doctors who had helped staff the Delano Free Medical Clinic. Along with a full-time registered nurse—Peggy McGivern—and Marion Moses, who served as volunteer nurse after having been head nurse of the medical/surgical unit at the Kaiser Foundation Hospital in San Francisco, they had maintained the clinic since October, 1965, providing free clinic care to both the NFWA and AWOC strikers. Medical and dental students from the University of California, San Francisco had also been assisting the clinic. Moses would later become a physician—board-certified in public heath and preventive medicine. Her interest in chemical poisons began with her work with the union, first as a nurse from 1966 to 1971, and then as the medical director of the National Farm Workers Health Group from 1983 to 1986.

Today, Dr. Moses directs the Pesticide Education Center, founded in San Francisco in 1988 to educate workers and the general public about the adverse heath effects of chemical poisons and the availability of safer alternatives. In addition to serving as a doctor to Chavez and the Catholic Worker’s Dorothy Day, she has also served on many government panels and committees, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Veterans Administration, and the Toxic Substances Advisory Committee.

Lackner explained to the subcommittee that most of his examinations of patients in Delano had shown them suffering from respiratory tract infections and gastroenteritis, both of possibly viral origin and of longer duration than those patients he examined in private practice. He gave an example, however, of a more serious case and the inordinate obstacles faced by farmworkers.

“I was asked by the nurse to make a house call on a person who was unable to come to the clinic. The husband, who had just two days previously joined the strike, came to the clinic and asked us to see his sick wife.

“We followed him to a very nice, relatively newly built bungalow apartment. Not bad looking, I thought. It had a bathroom, a small living room, and a little kitchen. It would have been an ideal residence for a young couple without children. Inside, though, were a mother and seven children. The stench of putrefying, necrotic tissue filled the interior of the apartment. A baby of 18 months lay asleep on the bare floor in front of a blazing gas heater.

“The mother lay sick on the couch, She had delivered her seventh baby at home with the aid of a neighbor lady several days before I arrived. There was reportedly a considerable blood loss. She was pale and febrile, appeared very toxic, and had a profuse malodorous lochia, which she absorbed on towels stuffed into her underwear. She complained of lower abdominal pains and unquestionably was suffering from fulminant endometritis and probable puerperal sepsis. It was Christmas Eve; I wondered who would take care of the children when she died; the new baby was asleep in the crib.

“I called the county hospital and talked to the admitting resident; prompt evaluation and probable admission was concurred on. I phoned the emergency room four times in the next five to six hours before the poor man showed up at the hospital with his wife. Even then, it was hard for me to understand how it could take anyone so long. The next day he explained.

“He had to go to the NFWA office to get money for gasoline. He had to find a friend whose car would make the trip. He had to place the six older children with a friend who had seven children. Once in Bakersfield, he had to find the house of a relative with enough know-how to bottle-feed and care for the new baby, and then the relative pointed him in the direction of the hospital, which he had trouble finding at midnight, as he had never been there before. Fortunately, the patient responded well to what must have been technically excellent treatment and was later discharged to return to her family.”

As Lackner spoke of the inadequate medical facilities available to farmworkers, many in the audience thought back to the night of January 27 and the death of the NFWA’s San Francisco field representative Roger Terronez. The 32-year-old farmworker and former prize fighter had been fatally injured in a freak automobile accident near Delano.

Terronez, father of four children, was taken alive to the Delano hospital. Neither the type of medical care nor the doctors that he needed were available. He was unconscious for two hours as specialists were brought from Bakersfield 32 miles away. The Delano equipment, however, was inadequate, and an ambulance was called to take him to a Bakersfield hospital. He died en route.

Describing his relations with physician members of the Kern and Tulare county hospitals, Lackner was impressed with their interest and intent to provide proficient and prompt medical care for patients he referred in. He did not feel the same way about some of the paramedical personnel in the hospitals.

It was the same paramedical personnel that this writer was concerned about the night before the Delano hearings, but out of that fear came a demonstration of the giving humanitarianism of Lackner. In the process of covering the three days of hearings, I was accompanied by my then-wife and infant son, David.

The afternoon of the second day, he developed his first serious cold, and, being new and concerned parents, we were anxious about his condition. Originally, I had planned to stay with him and his mother in the Stardust in Delano that evening, in case his condition worsened. I remembered, however, that I had seen Lackner’s name on the witness list for the next day, and, knowing that the farmworkers were having a rally that evening, I decided to go to the rally to see if I could locate Lackner and get some advice on what we could do to relieve David’s misery.

At the rally I quickly found Lackner and after apologizing to him for taking advantage of his medical expertise at this late hour, explained to him David’s condition. He, being familiar with my coverage of the strike, didn’t hesitate a moment in writing out a prescription for me. After some searching I found a drugstore to fill the prescription and returned to our motel room. The medicine seemed to have some effect, but about 3 a.m., David awakened us with a terrible hacking cough, crying in discomfort.

Because I was fearful of how he might be treated if we took him to the local hospital, since by that time I wasn’t exactly appreciated by the Delano citizenry for my coverage of the strike, my wife and I worked out a plan whereby I would drive her to the hospital and let her take him to be examined, thereby not complicating David’s treatment.

She immediately bundled him up against the chill night air, and I went downstairs to warm up the car before we left. Descending the stairway, I met Lackner, who had just completed making some urgent house calls in the farmworker community. I explained to him that we were taking David to the local hospital since he didn’t seem to be getting any better, despite the prescription the doctor had given me earlier in the night.

Lackner, after listening to my concerns, told me to go back upstairs, get David undressed, and he would be in our room momentarily to examine him, which he did, and found that he was merely suffering from a bad cold with flu-like symptoms and gave us some medicine from his kit for David’s relief.

It was an act of kindness that neither my wife nor I would ever forget. Lackner later in the late 1960s and early ’70s became Cesar Chavez’s personal physician. In concluding his testimony before the subcommittee, Lackner pleaded that the senators speed legislation that would insure farmworkers those rights, protections, and benefits other American working people enjoy.

“I urge you in the health interests of the farm laborer to legislate to the effect that farm laborers have the right to federal minimum wages, to overtime pay, to sick leave, to unemployment insurance, to health, welfare, and pension plans, to the enforcement of child labor laws, to an intelligent, humane person-oriented rather than crop-oriented solution to the fact that some labor is by nature seasonal, and above all, to the effect that farm labor has the right and the duty to organize—the right to union recognition and to collective bargaining.

“Viva la huelga!”

This homemade edition, autographed by Andy Zermeño – a veritable collector’s item – is available for $35 + $3 postage. To order, make checks payable to: Andy Zermeño and send to: LeRoy Chatfield, 5131 Pleasant Dr. Sacramento CA 95822 OR use the Donate link on Website: www.farmworkermovement.us

COVER / INTRODUCTION / TABLE OF CONTENTS / TEASER PAGES