began his career as an organizer through the Community Service Organization (CSO), a Mexican American civil rights organization based in Southern California. Founded in 1947 in the wake of Edward Roybal’s first campaign for Los Angeles city council, the CSO began as a mutual aid society that encouraged political participation and integration of Mexican Americans. Fred Ross, the white West Coast regional director of Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF), became CSO executive director. Ross recruited and trained Chavez to be an organizer for the CSO in 1952.14
One of Ross’s most important organizing tactics that he taught Chavez was the house meeting. This method was completely dependent on personal connections; once the organizer identified an interested person, she/he would ask that person to hold a small meeting in their home and to invite a few of their friends. The intimacy of the small house meeting would then allow people to speak freely about their concerns. Chavez recalled, “When I talked to people at their homes, it was unbelievable how their attitude changed, how different it was from when I talked to them in the fields.” After conducting house meetings for several weeks, a mass meeting would be held to organize a CSO chapter. Similarly, after SNCC organizers had been canvassing in African American communities for some time, they held mass meetings to bring people together, create a sense of solidarity, and mobilize people to action. As historian Charles Payne argued in his study of civil rights organizing in Mississippi,
Maybe canvassing is the prototypical organizing act. It is the initial reaching out to the community, the first step toward building relationships outside the circle of those favorably predisposed to the movement. Mass meetings were another step in that process. If canvassers could awaken an initial curiosity in people, mass meetings could weld curiosity into commitment.
The same argument could be made about the role of organizers and mass meetings in the CSO, which demonstrates that many of the activities of the early CSO resembled those of SNCC.15
The CSO and SNCC both sought political power for their communities through voter registration. However, since many CSO members were not U.S. citizens, Ross implemented citizenship classes that eventually become key components of every CSO chapter. The classes were open to all ages and included literacy instruction. Chavez recalled of the classes, “Where the kids sat during the day, the parents would sit at night, and we not only taught them the Constitution and basic English but we also taught them to fill out all the citizenship forms.” In both format and content, CSO citizenship classes paralleled SNCC voter registration efforts. In the South, African Americans were prevented from registering to vote in many ways, including through the use of literacy tests. In some areas, African Americans who wished to register were asked to interpret a section of the Constitution. SNCC therefore devised education programs that taught literacy and government and instructed adults in the process of voter registration.16
After serving as the director of the CSO, Chavez resigned to work on behalf of farmworkers and founded the NFWA in 1962. However, he took Ross’s lessons in organizing and applied them to the recruitment of farmworkers. The similarities between Chavez’s and SNCC’s approaches to organizing facilitated the eventual alliance between the two organizations. The work of Chavez and SNCC became even more closely aligned when SNCC began organizing migrant farmworkers on Maryland’s eastern shore in 1964. It was this project that convinced Mike Miller that SNCC’s techniques could be applied to Mexican American farmworkers in California. Even though the migrant farmworkers on the East Coast were primarily African American, Miller persuaded SNCC to explore the idea of voter registration among California’s Mexican American farmworkers, whom he saw as suffering from the same racial discrimination and economic exploitation. In December 1964 Miller wrote a letter to the national SNCC staff outlining a proposal to organize farmworkers in California. Miller explained, “Some of you have heard me talk about the California Valley. It is our Delta. It is a land of immense richness and the deepest of poverty.” Miller was especially interested in working with the NFWA, which he had learned of through Ross, whom he had met through his activities at UC Berkeley.17
Immediately after SNCC approved his program, Miller contacted the union in January 1965 through his friend Coleman Blease, a Sacramento lawyer who had worked with NFWA co-founder Dolores Huerta, to discuss voter registration. Blease wrote to Huerta in January of 1965, requesting a meeting between Chavez, Huerta, Miller, and Bob Moses, director of SNCC organizing in Mississippi. Blease opined, “I believe that any cooperative venture between SNCC and the Farm Workers Association would be most fruitful.” Although Chavez did not attend the meeting, which occurred in late January 1965, it established the first formal connection between SNCC and the NFWA.18
Miller’s actions demonstrate the importance of individual leadership in coalition building. Although significant, parallel ideologies and praxis did not necessarily lead to the formation of alliances between organizations. For example, scholars have pointed out that although the NAACP had much in common with LULAC, they did not work together, even when both organizations were fighting school segregation in the courts. Individuals were necessary to recognize the potential of working with others and lead their organizations to form a coalition. Miller’s background in both labor and civil rights organizing enabled him to serve as a bridge between the NFWA and SNCC and guide the formation of their alliance.19
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True to Blease’s prediction, the newly formed alliance between SNCC and the NFWA proved invaluable for the farmworkers just a few months after the initial meeting between the two organizations. In July 1965, the NFWA and the California Migrant Ministry (CMM)—an offshoot of the National Council of Churches that both ministered to farmworkers and assisted them in their fight for justice—organized a rent strike against the Tulare County Housing Authority. The Housing Authority had doubled the rent at the Woodville and Linnell labor camps, despite no increase in pay for the farmworker residents and no improvement of the unsanitary, Depressionera tin huts, which the County Health Department had condemned. Finding themselves ill-prepared for a rent strike, the CMM’s Reverend Jim Drake and Gilbert Padilla, who had worked with Chavez in the CSO, called on the San Francisco SNCC office to send organizers to assist. The SNCC volunteers who heeded the call were especially helpful when 350 farmworkers and supporters marched six miles from the Linnell camp to the Housing Authority offices. The influence of SNCC’s use of nonviolent direct action was clear in the rules given to the marchers, which began, “All participants in this action project are asked to maintain discipline and conduct themselves in a nonviolent manner. Nonviolence has been shown to be a powerful force when used by a dedicated group trained in understanding and discipline.” The rules’ emphasis on nonviolence reflected SNCC’s founding statement, which proclaimed, “By appealing to conscience and standing on the moral nature of human existence, nonviolence nurtures the atmosphere in which reconciliation and justice become actual possibilities.”20
Figure 1. Child in front of a dilapidated house in a farm labor camp. Courtesy of Walter P. Reuther Library, Wayne State University.
Along with contributing strategy, SNCC also supported the rent strike by diligently reporting on it in The Movement. According to Cannon, the newspaper’s staff “saw early just simply the need to publicize what was going on.” Although San Francisco SNCC published the newspaper, it was disseminated to SNCC and Friends of SNCC offices nationwide. Through The Movement, many in SNCC first learned of racial and social problems outside the South. For example, to illustrate the similarities between farmworkers on the East and West Coasts, the front page of the August 1965 issue of The Movement placed an article on the Tulare County strike next to an article on the Tennessee Freedom Labor Union, an organization of black farmworkers and sharecroppers. Subsequent issues of The Movement included additional pieces on farmworkers and reprinted articles from El Malcriado, the NFWA newspaper. Along with Miller, the staff of The Movement operated as bridge leaders by highlighting the commonalities, rather than the
