thing. The NFWA would have to come up with some other tactics.
After the unexpected, dramatic success on the San Francisco docks, Chavez authorized Jim Drake to try to organize some kind of formal grape boycott. Drake had no budget, no phone of his own, no office. Cesar regularly talked to him about various boycott plans, but made no great commitment to the project—he was more concerned with other matters: figuring out how to force the governor to put pressure on the growers to negotiate; maintaining the morale of the members and volunteers; trying to set up organizing projects in different farm worker areas. Drake was on his own. To concentrate on his task, he had to find a separate place to work. During the strike, the NFWA had rented an abandoned labor camp a few miles outside of Delano. In serious disrepair, mosquito-infested, the camp seemed to sink deeper into the mud after every winter rain. But this didn’t dampen the energy of some volunteers, whose hopes remained high. On the wall near the entrance someone had painted three names in large letters: Zapata, Villa, Chavez. Two old toilets with indoor plumbing stood on the grounds but separated from the rest of the buildings. Chavez designated the women’s toilet as the first boycott office; the men’s toilet would henceforth be genderless.
Drake had found his office space. He was delighted to be set loose on his pet project, and in good humor he hung Air Wicks in his new windowless outpost. It still stank. Drake got Richard Chavez to bolt a board on top of the old toilet bowl, and to build a regular desk next to it. He had a phone line installed. From Hartmire he got a list of progressive Protestants as potential supporters of a boycott. A new NFWA volunteer, Brother Gilbert, helped him put together a list of possible Catholic supporters. He called Mike Miller of Bay Area Friends of SNCC and got the names and numbers of student and civil rights activists. The last group was the most promising. In San Francisco in early October, SNCC, CORE, and Citizens for Farm Labor had started acting on their own even before the longshoremen had refused to touch the grapes, and 100 people had picketed the San Francisco office of the Schenley Corporation, demanding that it settle with its striking grape workers. When the office workers first saw the picket line outside, they figured the people were demanding the hiring of black office workers. The picketers returned every Friday afternoon. If such picket lines could be maintained in other areas, wouldn’t that be the beginning of a national boycott?18
Drake asked Miller to be cochair of whatever they all decided the boycott effort might turn out to be. At twenty-seven, Mike Miller was already a political veteran. As a Berkeley undergraduate in the late 1950s, he had founded Slate, a precursor of the later New Left campus organizations. In 1960 he met Saul Alinsky, and through Alinsky he met Fred Ross, who sparked his interest in the Central Valley, kept him informed of the progress of the CSO, and introduced him to Cesar Chavez. In 1961, deeply inspired by the first southern sit-ins, Miller started working with SNCC, quickly joined the staff, and helped build the Bay Area Friends of SNCC, an organization designed to raise money for SNCC’s southern voter registration campaigns. Eager to get closer to the battlefield, he went to work with Bob Moses in Greenwood, Mississippi in 1963, and returned home only after a serious late-night automobile accident on a deserted Mississippi road. He remained a SNCC field secretary working in the Bay Area and helped select the West Coast students who participated in Mississippi Summer. He envisioned SNCC as a group of full-time professional organizers who would work in various communities throughout the country, not just with African Americans in the South. In 1964 he helped start an organizing project to fight urban renewal in the Fillmore District, one of San Francisco’s main black neighborhoods, and the initial success of that project plus his longtime honorable service in SNCC made him one of the most influential young white activists in the country. It was that influence that Drake and Chavez needed. Several other SNCC field secretaries were already active in California, and Miller, with his quiet, unassuming, but authoritative voice, offered direction and advice to all of them. Now the NFWA was asking SNCC to cosponsor a national table grape boycott and offering Mike Miller the position of co-chairman. He did not hesitate to accept.19
Drake, Miller, and Chavez quickly agreed on a few essentials. They would focus on Schenley and DiGiorgio. Those were the two big Delano-area corporations that produced not only table grapes but also various other brand-name products that would be easy to identify and boycott. Since the Christmas season was near, initially they would go after Schenley, as the company produced or marketed several popular wines and liquors, including Cutty Sark, Ancient Age, and I.W. Harper. They agreed that the boycott could be put into motion quickly in the nation’s major cities by various Friends of SNCC groups, CORE chapters, and the rapidly multiplying New Left student organizations. Those folks had already been doing support work for black civil rights initiatives and could easily transfer some of their energy and experience into support for Mexican American farm workers. As an extra bonus, the boycott cities would be an excellent place to send many of the white volunteers who had staffed the farm worker picket lines but were now just hanging around Delano without much to do.
Many questions remained. Drake and Miller, both deeply interested in organizational matters, talked over the possibilities. In the long run, what would the various boycott organizations look like? Would they continue to be run by the already established left and civil rights groups? Would they be new coalitions put together by those groups? Who would be part of that coalition? Religious organizations certainly, but labor unions, too? What formal relationship would the boycott organizations have to the NFWA and SNCC? What about duplicating the experience in Los Angeles, where NFWA leaders—first Dolores Huerta and then Gilbert Padilla—had built an effective boycott committee? All of that was left up in the air, as priority was given to the question of what exactly the first boycott activities should be. They were confident of their legal right to call for a direct consumer boycott of Schenley products, but beyond that they were not sure. What about a secondary boycott, asking consumers not to buy in stores that handled the boycotted liquor? Drake and Miller decided to play it safe. The first formal instructions to boycotters, signed by SNCC and the NFWA, called the proposed campaign “a consumer information boycott” and told activists that “we are forbidden by law to boycott stores merely because they handle Schenley products.”20
Drake and Miller had it wrong—the secondary boycott was legal because farm workers were not covered by the national labor law—but it didn’t matter because the actual boycotters simply ignored the instructions (if they even saw them) and began to apply pressure directly against liquor stores. CORE picketers swept through Harlem and reported back to the NFWA that all of the forty-nine liquor stores they had visited had agreed to stop handling Schenley products. In one store the thirty pickets had to “visit” for quite some time, milling around inside without making any purchases, before the owner agreed that justice was on the farm workers’ side. Similar militant black and white picket lines forced the removal of Schenley liquor and wine from stores in Oakland, Berkeley, and San Francisco, where fourteen of fifteen Mission District liquor stores got rid of Schenley products in one afternoon. Many store owners refused to comply, hoping to wait out the storm, but the new wind was just beginning to blow. Picket lines became more enthusiastic and more diverse. Trade unionists arrived; church activists joined. A new coalition was beginning to form.21
Back in Delano, Drake could hardly keep up with the new developments. Often he didn’t go back to his home in Porterville at night but instead slept on the floor of his office. One night it rained especially hard, and as water seeped onto the floor, he moved to the top of his desk. But it wasn’t big enough for his six-foot-one-inch frame and the only way he could keep his feet out of the water was by resting them on the board over the commode. It didn’t bother him one bit. Rain was pouring in, but so were the stories. His favorite one involved a teenage boy and girl who had arrived in Delano early in the strike, holding hands. As soon as the boycott started, Drake asked them to go to New York. They didn’t hesitate. They simply picked up their sleeping bags and hitchhiked east—in the middle of December. In a snowstorm outside of Denver, they were picked up by the police and arrested for vagrancy. The cops threw them in jail, where the couple told the story of the strike and the boycott to the inmates and guards. The next morning, the police took up a collection, gave them some money, and put them on the highway outside of town to resume their journey. Drake told the story around the NFWA compound, punctuating
