The Teamsters attempted to mobilize a counteroffensive in response to the boycott, but they were unable to rally the kind of support that the farmworkers had from SNCC and other progressive activists. According to Ganz, “For many in the cities, for whom the grape strike had been framed as the struggle of an ‘oppressed minority fighting for its freedom,’ the Teamsters were a powerful and corrupt white union conspiring with powerful white growers to deny the rights of powerless earnest Mexican farm workers.” The Teamsters’ violent behavior toward farmworkers and their supporters, such as the beating of UFWOC organizer Eliseo Medina during the DiGiorgio campaign, strengthened this image. This dynamic of the minority farmworkers versus white growers and Teamsters demonstrated the parallels between the UFWOC’s struggle and that of African Americans; it also facilitated SNCC staff members’ continued support of the union’s fight against racial discrimination and economic oppression. Therefore, SNCC expressed support for the union and participated in its boycott of Perelli-Minetti products in New York, Chicago, and Milwaukee. The boycott proved so financially damaging that Perelli-Minetti signed a contract with the UFWOC in July 1967.18
* * *
The multiracial solidarity that characterized SNCC’s protest activities against DiGiorgio and Perelli-Minetti became increasingly limited to the San Francisco SNCC office and its supporters. These organizers remained committed to multiracial solidarity and cooperation. Moreover, their understanding of the link between racial discrimination and economic exploitation enabled them to recognize that the Mexican American farmworkers had much in common with African Americans in the Deep South. However, shifts in ideology, priorities, and tactics among SNCC’s other members eventually destroyed its alliance with the UFWOC. For those in SNCC whose ideas about race were becoming increasingly nationalistic and separatist, the fact that the organization’s alliance with the farmworkers was cross-racial made it untenable.19
The evolution of SNCC’s ideology occurred within broader developments in the black freedom struggle. Some black activists and intellectuals, particularly in the urban North, rejected (or at least questioned) the integrationist goals of the southern civil rights movement. They believed that integration privileged whiteness by demanding proximity to it and did not result in true equality for African Americans through the sharing of resources and power. Moreover, the massive white resistance to the desegregation of schools and public accommodations in the South demonstrated that the complete incorporation of African Americans into American institutions was unfeasible. Rather, the common experience of racism proved that African Americans (and all people of African descent throughout the diaspora) were part of a distinct black “nation” with common issues and struggles. Black nationalist and minister in the Nation of Islam, Malcolm X, explained in 1963 in his speech, “Message to the Grassroots,”
What you and I need to do is learn to forget our differences. When we come together, we don’t come together as Baptists or Methodists. You don’t catch hell ’cause you’re a Baptist, and you don’t catch hell ’cause you’re a Methodist. . . . You don’t catch hell because you’re a Democrat or a Republican. You don’t catch hell because you’re a Mason or an Elk. And you sure don’t catch hell ’cause you’re an American; ’cause if you was an American, you wouldn’t catch no hell. You catch hell ’cause you’re a black man. You catch hell, all of us catch hell, for the same reason.
Although there was much variation among black nationalists, they shared ideals of black pride, racial unity, and self-determination. Some black nationalists, in developing a positive conception of “blackness” as the center of community identity, called for racial separatism as a more empowering alternative to integration. As such, multiracial coalition building was an impractical and unappealing strategy for racial separatists.20
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