my wife (which was not so easy) to move.” That year, Rangel, his wife, and eight children committed their lives to the union, going first to Portland, Oregon, and eventually to Detroit, Michigan to oversee the boycott.6
College students imbued with a desire to make change also signed up in significant numbers. For some young people, such as Marshall Ganz, getting involved in the farm worker movement proved to be a homecoming. As a Jewish boy growing up in Bakersfield, California, during the 1950s, Ganz had developed a consciousness about the fight for civil rights in the South but had not yet recognized the relevance of this battle to his own backyard. “I grew up in the middle of the farm worker world,” recalled Ganz, “but of course never saw it.” Although his debate coach in high school tried to direct his attention to the farm workers, it took a trip to the Deep South while in college for him to discover the importance of civil rights activism back home. “I had to go to Mississippi and get [an] education about race and class and politics,” Ganz remembered, “so that when I came back, I could see with what we call ‘Mississippi eyes.’” Ganz acquired this new way of seeing during Freedom Summer, a Mississippi workshop in 1964 run by a coalition of northern black youths and southern black activists to train mostly white, northern college students to help in the fight to extend the franchise to African Americans in the South.7 Ganz made his way to Mississippi that summer from Harvard University, joining such future leaders as Mario Savio from the University of California at Berkeley, who went on to lead the free speech movement, and Heather Booth from the University of Chicago, who later founded the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union. The experience changed Ganz’s life and made him more aware of the shared history of segregation and violence between African Americans in the South and people of color in rural California: “I mean, it was like seeing through a different lens, and it was like, oh, people of color, oh, no political rights, just like the South … marginal wages, just like the South. California’s own history of segregation, racial discrimination, just like the South.… And so it was much more like an extension of the movement than it was like, ‘Oh, I’m going to work for a union,’ which wouldn’t have occurred to me [before Freedom Summer].”8
FIGURE 6. At a United Farm Workers rally, Cesar Chavez looks over a binder with Marshall Ganz. Location unknown, 1971. ALUA, UFW Collection, 3248.
Ganz belonged to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, one of the primary recruitment and training organizations for Freedom Summer. For SNCC, 1964 was a sobering experience, as their peaceful but persistent protests went unheeded by the national Democratic Party. At the Democratic National Convention that year, the party stalwarts, including the Party’s nominee, President Lyndon B. Johnson, refused to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party as the representative for the state even after national media coverage brought the violence against civil rights protesters in Mississippi to public light. The murders of several civil rights workers, including three volunteers involved with Mississippi Summer—Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney—proved to organizers that black and white activists could be killed with impunity. As a consequence, SNCC leaders contemplated a more confrontational politics but also embraced an expansion of the movement by placing SNCC representatives with social justice organizations operating outside of the South.
Ganz’s path to the union came by way of the kind of diversity and inter-group dialogue that had lifted the farm worker movement in the early days and made the success of the boycott a possibility. Ganz, who had come back to Bakersfield at the end of 1964 in preparation for his return to Harvard in the fall of 1965, reconnected with an old friend, LeRoy Chatfield. By this time, Chatfield had abandoned the clergy to work with Chavez on the rent strike. Ganz had read about the strike while working for SNCC and accepted an invitation from Chatfield to meet Chavez. As with so many young people, Chavez persuaded Ganz to change his plans for the fall and instead appeal to SNCC leaders to make him a paid representative for the student organization within UFW. SNCC responded by approving Ganz’s proposal and sent him and an additional representative, Dickie Flowers—or Dickie Flores, as the Spanish speakers in the union referred to him—to California. Eventually, Stokely Carmichael, the new leader of SNCC, came to California to meet Chavez in the fall of 1965 and made Ganz the sole representative of SNCC within the farm workers union. SNCC paid Ganz $10 per week, five more dollars per week than what the union could afford to pay its staff. Ganz recalled, “I was sort of a labor aristocrat there.” This arrangement lasted until August 1966, when SNCC embraced the black power movement and chose a more unilateral, blacks-for-blacks-only approach to civil rights. According to Ganz, “I may have been the last white person on the SNCC payroll (laughter).”9
The early success of the boycott exceeded the expectations of Chavez and the leadership of the union. During the first two years, growers watched the “free on board” (FOB) price of a lug (box) of their grapes plummet from a high of over $6 in 1966 to approximately $5.50 in 1968, on its way down to $4.89 in 1969.10 In addition to Drake, who served as the information director for Chavez, LeRoy Chatfield and a Bay Area ally, Mike Miller, communicated with boycott organizers located in key cities around the country. Indicative of the supplemental role the boycott played in this period, some of the communication came from Delano, where Chatfield and Drake spent much of their time, and some of the communication emanated from a San Francisco office convenient to Miller’s location.11 The union lacked so much in the way of infrastructure that Chavez had to rely on staff located throughout the state to carry out multiple tasks. Those involved in the boycott celebrated the moral victory of swaying the consumers in a given city or at a specific market but had little time to devise a system for charting their success. Tantamount to building a plane while flying it, Chavez and a small group of leaders constructed the union by stringing together public relations victories that gathered endorsements from a diverse set of supporters.
Securing well-positioned allies had been one of the early keys to Chavez’s success. For example, when the AFL-CIO convened its annual meeting in San Francisco in 1965, the grape strike and boycott had piqued the interest of fellow unionists, but no one in organized labor formally endorsed the farm workers until UAW president, Walter Reuther, stepped out in support of the union. In the spring of 1967, Senator Robert F. Kennedy drew media attention to the struggle in a series of hearings by the Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Labor. Although the subcommittee chair, Senator George Murphy (R-California), staunchly supported agribusiness and hoped to sway public opinion against the farm workers, Kennedy’s aggressive questioning of the Kern County sheriff, LeRoy Gallyen, on charges of false arrests of picketers exposed law enforcement officials’ abuse of activists’ civil rights and ignorance of the law. After the last hearing, Kennedy paid an unexpected visit to Filipino Hall, where he declared his support for the grape strike. Kennedy later joined a UFW picket line at DiGiorgio’s ranch and was a close ally of the movement for the remainder of his life.12
The success of the boycott and the political events surrounding the Delano-to-Sacramento march placed Schenley and DiGiorgio on the wrong side of public opinion. Although grape growers dug their collective heels in against the union, Schenley’s chief executive officer, Lewis Rosensteil, recognized the UFW campaign as a liability to the many products marketed by his company. Blackey Levitt’s ability to deliver support from the bartenders union and the cooperation of the Teamsters in San Francisco not to load Schenley products worried the company brass, as Schenley’s vice president James Woolsey later testified to the California Senate Subcommittee on Agriculture: “These reprisals and the publicity presented a threat of serious damage to our business on a nationwide scale. Our sales department felt that even more damaging than any decline in our sales was the adverse publicity that accompanied the boycott and the NFWA organizing activities.”13 Schenley was one of the four largest liquor distributors in the country, and its primary ownership of Central Valley grape vineyards had to do with wine production, not table grapes. Moreover, whereas the table grape growers had a tradition of not negotiating with unions, Schenley settled a strike by Galarza’s National Farm Labor Union in 1952 by increasing wages, establishing
