prompted SNCC to rally to the side of the NFWA. However, SNCC’s involvement in the Delano strike was initially limited to the activities of the San Francisco staff, as the national organization’s headquarters in Atlanta was at first ignorant of the relationship that had blossomed between it and the NFWA. On September 25, 1965, Muriel Tillinghast in the national SNCC office sent a letter to Chavez explaining the organization and asking him for information on the NFWA. The national SNCC office did not appear to be aware of the strike because Tillinghast did not mention it. In the postscript, she informed him that “SNCC folk in San Francisco are working with Mexican-American [sic] and you might want to contact them . . . Mike Miller heads that office.” While this must have been confusing to Chavez and embarrassing to the San Francisco SNCC staff, who had been working with the NFWA for several months, it is not surprising due to SNCC’s loose structure, which fostered the independence of its offices. However, this loose structure also resulted in disarray and a breakdown in communication within the SNCC staff.35
The Movement was instrumental in eliminating the communication gap between the national and San Francisco SNCC offices. The October 1965 issue covered the strike on the front page and featured an interview with Chavez that was conducted on September 25, making it the first interview with Chavez since the beginning of the strike. The issue also included articles explaining the strike in detail, an account of Terry Cannon’s firsthand experience on the picket line, and a call for donations for the farmworkers. These articles, particularly one on the harassment and physical assault of the striking farmworkers by growers and the police, demonstrated that the NFWA faced many of the same challenges as SNCC organizers in the South. The October 1965 edition of The Movement not only served to increase the national SNCC office’s awareness of the issues confronted by the NFWA, but it also prompted the rest of the organization to support the strike. Despite the fact that the SNCC offices outside San Francisco were slower to come to the aid of the NFWA, they were eventually able to embrace the union’s cause wholeheartedly because the farmworkers’ fight against both racial discrimination and economic oppression fit SNCC’s mission and resembled its experiences.36
With the approval of the national SNCC headquarters, which distributed funding to local projects, overall SNCC participation in the strike accelerated. The organization supplied the NFWA with two-way radios, which were vital to the strike’s effectiveness. The total area of the strike was one thousand square miles, which made it difficult for the NFWA to monitor farm owners’ use of scab labor. With the radios, scouts could quickly inform the NFWA office when scabs entered the fields. The union could then send pickets to the fields being worked by scabs. Moreover, as SNCC was well aware, two-way radios could be life-saving apparatus in the face of violence by growers and police. In July 1965 SNCC set up a radio network for the Louisiana chapter of CORE. Three months later SNCC asked Louisiana CORE to return the favor by lending four of the radios to the NFWA. These radios supplemented those sent to Delano from SNCC offices in the South. SNCC not only supplied the radios, but also obtained a business band license for the NFWA to use.37
Even though the national SNCC office supported the strike, it initially appeared detached and uninterested, especially in comparison to the involvement of the San Francisco SNCC office. In November 1965, a frustrated Mike Miller wrote to the national office asking why no one had addressed his repeated requests, which included the addition of George Ballis to the SNCC staff and scholarship money for Hardy Frye so that he could continue working for SNCC. Miller also proposed that Chavez be invited to SNCC’s national staff meeting at the end of the month and that SNCC chairman John Lewis issue a statement in support of the strike, uniting the plights of Mexican American farmworkers and African American sharecroppers and proclaiming that “we, as a civil rights organization, are concerned with the human rights of all people.” Miller received little sympathy from the national headquarters; in a reply sent November 20, a staff member in the national SNCC office, which was responsible for hiring staff, informed him that she did not know who George Ballis was and added, “If we are to request additional salaries, I tend to think that we should take care of the most pressing needs first.” She also noted that SNCC executive secretary James Forman thought that attending the SNCC staff meeting would take Chavez away from the strike for too long, but “if Chaves [sic] wants to come bring him.” No mention was made of a statement from Lewis.38
Despite the aloofness of the SNCC headquarters, Miller worked to ensure that its support for the NFWA not only continued, but increased. At Miller’s invitation, Chavez and Forman spoke at the statewide meeting of California SNCC and Friends of SNCC groups in November 1965. A few days later, Miller and Marshall Ganz attended the national SNCC staff meeting and gave a presentation on the Delano strike as part of a panel on migrant labor organizing. Although Chavez did not attend the meeting, Miller recalled that the SNCC staff members who were present were “curious, interested, very positive.” As a result of their presentation, the SNCC staff voted to give full support to the union and to allow Ganz to represent SNCC on the NFWA staff while still paying him as a SNCC field secretary. The national SNCC office also agreed to provide the farmworkers with extra manpower. In December 1965, a small delegation from SNCC, including Stokely Carmichael, Cleveland Sellers, and Ralph Featherstone, visited Chavez at the NFWA office in Delano to discuss how SNCC could further help the union. After the meeting, the group adjourned to the local hangout, People’s Bar, to drink beer and play pool. Ganz recalled, “Cesar was quite a pool player and so was Stokely and I think they surprised each other.” As a result of this meeting, SNCC sent Richard “Dickie” Flowers, an African American field secretary from Greenwood, Mississippi, to work with Ganz.39
Due to their work in the Deep South, Ganz and Flowers were assigned to organize in Bakersfield, a farming town south of Delano where there were more African American farmworkers than in other parts of the Central Valley. African Americans were a small percentage of farmworkers in both the NFWA and California, but Chavez was committed to organizing them as well. In an attempt to prevent workers from joining together to demand higher wages and better working conditions, growers separated workers by race. Organizing African American farmworkers, then, would create a sense of multiracial solidarity among the farmworkers and reduce strike breaking. Chavez explained, “Discrimination is bad for all the moral reasons, but it is also bad for reasons of unity. It can quickly destroy the Movement.” Chavez’s commitment to multiracial equality derived from his experience with the CSO. In the early 1950s, most members of the San Jose, California, chapter left after the president, Chavez’s sister Rita, attempted to punish a member for not allowing African Americans in his restaurant. Although the chapter nearly dissolved, Chavez stood by his sister’s decision: “We had a very strong commitment to civil rights. But if we wanted civil rights for us, then we certainly had to respect the rights of blacks, Jews, and other minorities.” The understanding that both Mexican Americans and African Americans experienced discrimination based on race and class thus infused the activities of the NFWA from its founding and predated the involvement of SNCC. The civil rights organization, however, was able to lend its experience in organizing African Americans in the South, many of whom were agricultural workers, to aid the union’s cause.40
In organizing African American farmworkers in Bakersfield, Ganz and Flowers utilized SNCC’s strategies, such as field secretaries working in interracial pairs. When conducting voter registration in Mississippi, for example, SNCC volunteers canvassed in interracial pairs to prevent local African Americans from facetiously agreeing to register to vote just to appease (and get rid of) the white organizer. However, Ganz and Flowers also learned and employed the organizing techniques developed by Chavez, such as the house meeting. By combining the organizing strategies of SNCC and the NFWA, Ganz and Flowers were able to recruit African American farmworkers, as well as white and Puerto Rican ones, to the union. Mack Lyons, a black farmworker who had migrated to Bakersfield from Texas in 1965, first noticed Ganz and Flowers passing out leaflets outside the DiGiorgio Corporation’s Arvin Ranch in Bakersfield: “We stopped and talked. I gave Marshall my address, and I asked him if he could come by my house that night. He and Richard Flowers almost beat me there.” Although Lyons did not join the NFWA that day, he joined at the next house meeting and went on to become one of the union’s foremost organizers.41
