pesticides.6
California farmworkers had made several attempts to organize and improve their conditions. For example, in 1928 the Confederación de Uniones Obreras (Federation of Labor Unions) was founded in Los Angeles and promptly organized a strike of cantaloupe workers in the Imperial Valley in Southern California. In the thirteen years following that strike, Mexican American workers organized themselves into unions and conducted strikes in the lettuce, pea, berry, beet, cotton, citrus, celery, and bean fields throughout California in pursuit of higher wages and improved working conditions. However, growers had successfully crushed these efforts through race riots and murders and by firing, evicting, and deporting workers who attempted to organize or strike. Similarly, sharecroppers’ attempts to organize in Arkansas and Alabama in the 1930s were met with evictions, arrests, race riots, and lynchings. Mike Miller—a white SNCC field secretary from San Francisco’s largely Latino Mission District neighborhood who ran that city’s SNCC office—recognized that African Americans and Mexican American agricultural workers experienced identical forms of overlapping racial discrimination and economic oppression. Miller therefore saw it as only fitting that SNCC reach out to California’s exploited farmworkers.7
Miller orchestrated SNCC’s involvement with the farmworkers during a time of transition for the organization. The Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, during which SNCC recruited white northern student volunteers to conduct voter registration among African Americans, heightened—and in some cases introduced—tensions regarding SNCC’s structure, direction, and identity. In the wake of beatings, murders, voter intimidation, and the inability of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP) to gain representation at the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, SNCC experienced a period of collective introspection. After the tumultuous summer, SNCC’s national headquarters in Atlanta called for members to present position papers at a staff meeting in Waveland, Mississippi in November 1964. Miller saw the meeting at Waveland as an opportunity to expand the mission of SNCC to include the plight of workers. In response to a questionnaire distributed to SNCC offices nationwide that accompanied the call for papers, Miller wrote,
That the question “what should be SNCC’s position on African affairs?” is raised and the question, for example, “what is SNCC’s position on the labor movement?” is not raised seems to me to ignore what we have to do here and now. . . . The day-to-day world in which we live is such that UAW affairs are probably more relevant to MFDP, COFO [Council of Federated Organizations], and SNCC than African affairs.
Many SNCC members were inspired by recent African liberation struggles and were thus motivated to form connections with countries freed from colonial rule. In fact, a SNCC delegation toured the continent and met with some of the leaders of the newly independent countries in September 1964. But Miller questioned the immediate relevance of Africa’s anticolonial struggles and instead wanted to see SNCC aligned with the farm labor movement.8
Miller’s interest in the plight of workers long predated his involvement in SNCC. He recalled, “When I was little, I was on my father’s shoulders on picket lines.” Miller’s father, James Miller, wrote for the newspaper of the International Fishermen and Allied Workers of America, which was expelled from the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in 1950 for being “communist dominated.” As an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, Miller focused his attention on agricultural workers when he became acquainted with veteran labor organizer Anne Draper, who worked with the National Farm Labor Advisory Committee and organized support activities on the Berkeley campus for striking workers. Under Draper’s influence, Miller organized rallies and food and clothing drives on behalf of the United Packinghouse Workers (UPWA) when it struck against cantaloupe growers in the Imperial Valley of California. In 1960, Miller organized the Student Committee for Agricultural Labor, which conducted grassroots organizing among farmworkers.9
Following his graduation from UC Berkeley, Miller attended graduate school in sociology at Columbia University. His passion for fighting on behalf of the oppressed followed him to New York City, where he organized public housing tenants on the Lower East Side. After six months, Miller was fired for being “too militant.” He then returned to the Bay Area to resume his graduate studies at the Berkeley. There Miller became re-involved with SLATE, a campus political organization he had helped found as an undergraduate.10
Miller’s experience could have led directly to a career on behalf of agricultural workers. However, SNCC was in need of his considerable organizing skills. In 1962 SLATE held a conference on “The Negro in America,” in which SNCC chairman Charles McDew participated. At the request of McDew, Miller became the SNCC representative in the Bay Area. Miller joined the SNCC staff full time the following winter, while still a graduate student. Soon after, Sam Block, a SNCC field secretary working on voter registration in Greenwood, Mississippi, went to Berkeley and asked Miller to work in Mississippi, which he did in July 1963.11
After being severely injured when his car was run off the road by hostile whites in Mississippi, Miller returned to expand SNCC activities in the Bay Area by setting up a Friends of SNCC office in San Francisco, part of a network of volunteers who worked to support the organization’s activities in the South. In addition, Miller and fellow activist Terence “Terry” Cannon established Freedom House, which organized against the redevelopment of the Fillmore District, a historically African American neighborhood in San Francisco. According to Cannon, the redevelopment project “was tearing the heart out of the black community there.” Miller and Cannon’s work against urban renewal was supported by the national SNCC office. Miller explained, “SNCC support work went well in the Bay Area, so national headquarters waived the usual rule that ‘field secretaries’ in the north were only to work on southern support. I was able to divide my time between support work for the South and participation in several losing San Francisco battles against urban renewal.” The San Francisco Friends of SNCC soon became a bona fide SNCC chapter, one of nine “northern offices” outside the Deep South and the only one in northern California. Miller asked Cannon to edit the office’s newsletter, which quickly evolved into The Movement, the national publication of SNCC.12
Miller and his colleagues in San Francisco SNCC firmly believed that SNCC’s organizing techniques could—and should—be applied to farmworkers in California. In their pursuit of civil rights, SNCC field secretaries practiced participatory democracy, which SNCC organizer Cleveland Sellers defined as “local people working to develop the power to control the significant events that affected their lives.” Operating under that philosophy, SNCC field secretaries did not impose leadership, but rather worked to identify indigenous leaders in the community and cultivate their leadership skills. Furthermore, SNCC organizers did not dictate to people what they should be fighting for and how they should go about it. Instead, they conducted what historian Charles Payne refers to as “slow and respectful work” in order to discern people’s interests and concerns before attempting to persuade them to register to vote. Miller described the ideal organizer who followed this model in an editorial in The Movement: “An organizer doesn’t like to do all the talking. He talks; he listens; he asks questions. He operates on the principle that the people in the streets, in the neighborhoods, in the fields, in the plants, on the unemployed lines, on the welfare rolls know better than he what they want and need—but they don’t know how to get it.” Thus, a good organizer, according to SNCC, helped empower people to make meaningful and lasting changes in their communities.13
SNCC’s organizing philosophy and tactics strongly resembled Chavez’s mission to empower farmworkers. Like SNCC, Chavez knew that effective organizing was slow work because it relied on making personal connections. He explained,
There are also some very simple things that have to be done in organizing, certain key things that nobody could get away without doing, like talking to people. If you talk to people, you’re going to organize them. But people aren’t going to come to you. You have to go to them. It takes a lot of work. When you pick grapes, you pick a bunch at a time. Eventually you pick the whole vineyard.
