involvement with the farmworkers intensified beginning in December 1965 when Chavez asked Mike Miller to coordinate a national boycott of Schenley Industries, a liquor company that owned one of the largest of the ranches being struck by the NFWA. The boycott had been the idea of Jim Drake, who took his cue from the civil rights movement: “Blacks used to boycott stores that wouldn’t hire them. So we decided to try it.” Chavez and Drake both recognized the effectiveness of the economic boycott as a weapon for civil rights, which had been employed so effectively during the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the earlier “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns. Although the Schenley boycott addressed the low wages and unsafe working conditions of the farmworkers rather than exclusion from employment, like these earlier examples, it demonstrated the connection between racial and economic inequality and therefore dovetailed with SNCC’s civil rights activism. The NFWA’s boycott of Schenley Industries took full advantage of SNCC’s skills, as well as its network of field secretaries and supporters. In fact, the decision to boycott Schenley came about after Chavez asked SNCC volunteers to research the connections of the Delano growers. The SNCC volunteers discovered that Schenley distributed well-known whiskeys such as Cutty Sark, as well as wine made with Delano grapes. Drake, Chavez, Miller and others recognized that Schenley products would be effective boycott targets because Americans could easily identify the company’s brands, as opposed to those of grapes.42
Even before the boycott began, SNCC was able to use its notoriety to gain publicity for the farmworkers’ fight against Schenley. Two months before the NFWA announced the boycott, SNCC began weekly picket lines in front of the company’s San Francisco offices. On discovering the pickets, Schenley executives wrongly assumed SNCC wanted the company to hire more African Americans. They quickly informed various civil rights organizations that they had a “Negro Vice-President.” The Movement reported, “On learning that the issue was not their treatment of Negroes, but their treatment of Mexican-Americans, they had nothing to say.” Once the boycott began, SNCC helped spread it nationwide through publicity in The Movement.43
The spread of the Schenley boycott nationwide enabled SNCC and Friends of SNCC chapters outside California to participate. The New York SNCC office was particularly helpful to the boycott because Schenley’s national headquarters were in that city and the local SNCC office could therefore put constant pressure on the company. In early December, Wendy Goepel Brooks visited New York SNCC and suggested that both SNCC and the local CORE chapter coordinate picket lines at New York and New Jersey grocery stores and schedule a meeting with Schenley executives to urge negotiations with the union. New York SNCC and CORE went into action immediately, organizing a letter-writing campaign and holding meetings on boycott action. They also conducted visits to liquor stores where delegations asked managers to remove Schenley products from their shelves and to display posters acknowledging their support of the strike. If managers did not comply, picket lines appeared outside the stores to inform consumers about the boycott. Twenty liquor stores in Brooklyn complied with the boycott within three weeks. SNCC and CORE were even more successful in Harlem, where all forty-nine stores visited by the activists agreed to cooperate with the boycott. The Movement reported on their effective tactics: “One reluctant retailer found himself with 30 or more would-be customers milling around his store but making no purchases. He got the point and joined his fellow merchants in boycotting Schenley.” SNCC and CORE’s stunning success on behalf of the NFWA in majority African American areas reveals that the organizations’ actions educated their constituencies on the connections between the racial and economic oppression experienced by African Americans and Mexican Americans.44
Participating in the farmworkers’ battle with Schenley allowed SNCC to demonstrate that it could apply its activist philosophy and tactics to oppressed groups other than African Americans. The final issue of The Student Voice, the national SNCC headquarters’ newsletter, urged readers to boycott Schenley products. The national headquarters also sent a memo to all Friends of SNCC chapters informing them of the strike details and instructing all to support the strike and the boycott. The memo explicitly linked the struggles of SNCC and the NFWA: “The workers have been harassed by strikebreaking tactics reminiscent of the 1930s and with police oppression typical of Birmingham’s Bull Connor and Selma’s Jim Clark.”45
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Members of SNCC were also involved when the union chose to utilize the march, a long-favored tactic of the civil rights movement and other American social movements. In February 1966 Chavez, Ganz, Dolores Huerta, and other NFWA organizers gathered at a supporter’s home near Santa Barbara for a three-day strategy meeting. During a brainstorming session over how to increase the visibility of the Schenley boycott, someone suggested marching from California to Schenley headquarters in New York, likening it to the Selma to Montgomery march of 1965. Realizing that New York was too far, someone else suggested that they march to the Schenley offices in San Francisco. But Chavez questioned whether Schenley would respond, so he recommended marching to Sacramento to put pressure on Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown to intervene. He also reasoned that Sacramento was an appropriate target because the California Fair Trade Act set a minimum price for liquor, meaning that “the California Legislature guaranteed a high price to Schenley for the liquor it made, but denied farm workers the right to a minimum wage.” Chavez further argued that since the season of Lent neared, this protest would not simply be a march. Rather, the protest should be a pilgrimage in the tradition of a Mexican peregrinación that would arrive in the capital on Easter Sunday. Chavez explained, “This was a penance more than anything else—and it was quite a penance, because there was an awful lot of suffering involved in this pilgrimage, a great deal of pain.” Chavez requested that Marshall Ganz coordinate the march and Terry Cannon serve as press secretary. With Miller, Ganz, and Cannon in charge of the boycott and march, SNCC activists were indispensable to the NFWA’s protest against Schenley Industries.46
Figure 2. Marshall Ganz (on left in white hat, carrying a clipboard) overseeing the Delano to Sacramento march, March 1966. Photo by Jon Lewis. Courtesy of the Farmworker Movement Documentation Project, http://www.farmworkermovement.org.
The march began on March 17, 1966, the day after the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Migratory Farm Labor held hearings in Delano, with sixty-eight farmworkers and NFWA staff members, and included Dickie Flowers of SNCC. Over the next twenty-five days, the marchers stopped overnight in nineteen farming communities and passed through many others along the 250-mile route to Sacramento. In each of these places the marchers held public meetings to explain the pilgrimage and the grape strike. At the overnight stops, which the NFWA had carefully selected, association members and other supporters were relied upon to provide food and housing for the marchers. El Malcriado noted that this was also calculated to demonstrate the widespread support for the farmworkers: “There is, contrary to public opinion, a community of farm workers—for the marchers never lacked food, shelter, or moral support.” Allies also demonstrated their support by marching with the farmworkers for a day or two when they passed through their towns. Throughout the march, the NFWA emphasized the importance of multiracial unity. The union proclaimed in the Plan of Delano, the march’s official statement of purpose, “We know that the poverty of the Mexican or Filipino worker in California is the same as that of all farm workers across the country, the Negroes and poor whites, the Puerto Ricans, Japanese, and Arabians; in short, all of the races that comprise the oppressed minorities of the United States.”47
Although the farmworkers were the heart and soul of the march, the collective organizing experience of the SNCC volunteers proved essential to the success of the march. Riding the length of the march in a panel truck equipped with a typewriter and a primitive version of a wireless telephone, Terry Cannon issued press releases and handled press relations to promote the march and boycott, but despite his efforts the march initially received little attention outside California. “When we started, I couldn’t get anyone. Nobody was interested.
