The Movement took such a great interest in the rent strike because the newspaper’s staff included members who shared a background in the labor movement and an interest in the struggles of agricultural workers. Editor Terry Cannon was a Midwestern Quaker whose mother had reported on sharecroppers during the Great Depression. One of The Movement’s most prolific photographers and writers was George Ballis. Following a short stint as a factory worker in Chicago, Ballis moved to Fresno, California, in January 1953 to edit the Valley Labor Citizen, a weekly pro-union newspaper. He soon became interested in farmworkers and began photographing them. Ballis became acquainted with SNCC and several of its staff members, including Mississippi field secretary Lawrence Guyot, in 1963 when he drove to the South with donations for the organization from the students of California State University, Fresno. In 1964, Ballis volunteered for SNCC as a photographer. When Mike Miller set up the SNCC office in San Francisco, Guyot suggested that Ballis be added to the staff. Ballis’s interest in agricultural workers provided The Movement with a significant degree of knowledge and sophistication about the plight of the farmworkers.22
The Movement’s staff also brought with them a profound understanding of economic inequality. Hardy Frye, another early staff member, grew up in Tuskegee, Alabama where he experienced the strict class divisions within the black community. As a young man in Tuskegee, he was not allowed to date the daughters of the black elite because he was “from the other side of the tracks.” He later reflected that his early experiences shaped his activism: “I probably brought an ideology to my Movement work . . . and it was class based.” His disgust with the city’s black elite led Frye to join the Army in order to escape Tuskegee. Stationed in Texas, Frye met Latinos for the first time and began to recognize the similarities between their experiences with discrimination and those of African Americans. After being discharged, he moved to Los Angeles, where he was active in the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). Through his activism, Frye met Mike Miller and helped establish the Sacramento Friends of SNCC while a student at Sacramento City College. He then went to Mississippi in 1964 as a volunteer for Freedom Summer, after which he returned to Sacramento and the Friends of SNCC chapter there. In this capacity, Frye worked closely with Father Keith Kenney, parish priest of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Sacramento, who ministered to farmworkers in the area and strongly supported the NFWA.23
SNCC’s support was enormously beneficial to the Tulare County rent strike. SNCC’s organizing techniques, as well as the publicity in The Movement, helped the farmworkers put constant pressure on the county Housing Authority. In the face of legal challenges, a district judge upheld the legality of the rent strike and declared the rent increases illegal. After over three years of delay, 100 new residences were built at the Woodville and Linnell Labor Camps in 1968. The rent strike was also successful in educating farmworkers about the NFWA. Chavez noted, “Short of getting into an agricultural strike, the rent strike . . . was one of the best ways of educating farm workers that there was a Union concerned with their economic interests.” Furthermore, the NFWA, CMM, and farmworkers greatly appreciated the SNCC members who helped with the rent strike and march and valued their experience. Padilla recalled, “Those young men, or these young people I should say, were guys who had been in Mississippi and stuff. So they were already trained in marches and how to deal. They came with the perspective.”24
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The alliance that had blossomed between SNCC and the NFWA was based on shared ideas and values: commitment to justice and equality, acknowledgement of the importance of personal connections in organizing, and a profound understanding of the relationship between racial discrimination and economic oppression. Furthermore, SNCC shared common organizing techniques and strategies with the CSO, in which the NFWA leaders had been trained as organizers. These qualities continued to sustain the relationship between the two organizations as the NFWA embarked on the most pivotal moment of its history. On September 16, 1965, Mexican Independence Day, the NFWA voted to join AWOC, a union of Filipino farmworkers, in their strike of grape growers in the Delano area. In the spring of 1965 AWOC staged a series of successful strikes in Coachella Valley, California to demand higher wages. When growers in Delano refused to meet the same demand for equal wages, the Filipino grape pickers went on strike at nine vineyards. Knowing that a farmworker strike could not succeed in Delano without the support of Mexican American farmworkers, AWOC leader Larry Itliong turned to Chavez. Chavez was initially caught off guard when Itliong approached him because the NFWA was still a growing organization and did not have the monetary reserves to support a strike by thousands of workers. Nevertheless, Chavez realized that only a united workforce could effectively pressure the growers into signing contracts. The coalition between AWOC and the NFWA echoed the CSO’s earlier cross-racial alliances with Asian American groups in Los Angeles to achieve political progress. Moreover, the alliance with the Filipino AWOC demonstrated that although the membership of the NFWA was overwhelmingly Mexican American, its fight for economic justice and equality for farmworkers was truly multiracial.25
As soon as the NFWA joined the strike, the growers, police, and townspeople became increasingly hostile and violent toward the farmworkers. Chavez recalled, “Growers pushed people around on the picket lines, ran tractors between pickets and the field to cover them with dust and dirt, drove cars and pickups with guns and dogs dangerously close to pickets at high speeds.” Chavez had studied Gandhi and was determined that the strike be nonviolent, which was becoming increasingly difficult as violence toward the strikers continued and tensions in the town of Delano escalated due to the arrival of press covering the strike. Furthermore, NFWA organizer Wendy Goepel Brooks acknowledged that “the farm workers were not necessarily at all nonviolent by nature, to put it mildly.” Recalling the influence of SNCC’s strategy of nonviolent direct action during the Tulare County rent strike, Chavez personally asked the San Francisco SNCC office to send organizers to Delano to teach courses on nonviolent resistance to the farmworkers. In doing so, he placed great importance on the experience the SNCC activists had gained in the southern civil rights movement. He explained, “In the beginning, the staff people didn’t thoroughly understand the whole idea of nonviolence, so I sent out the word to get young people who had been in the South and knew how to struggle nonviolently.”26
Chavez also called on CORE to send volunteers, due to the civil rights organization’s roots in pacifism and Gandhian nonviolent direct action. CORE volunteers taught classes in nonviolent resistance to the farmworkers and joined picket lines at the edges of the grape fields. On picket lines, CORE and SNCC members were especially valued for their experience in dealing with law enforcement. A NFWA leader explained, “You just couldn’t have someone who had never been on a picket line before. We needed somebody who could talk to the cops—or who had the confidence to talk to the cops.” However, the CORE volunteers soon moved on to other projects. In contrast, SNCC’s involvement with the NFWA grew to include additional staff members and volunteers throughout California. This was partly the result of SNCC’s loose structure, which encouraged, and even relied on, individual initiative. Offices and field secretaries were expected to develop their own projects that reflected the needs and issues of their communities. When successful, these regional projects became SNCC programs. SNCC field secretaries therefore had tremendous freedom in developing projects, as long as they adhered to SNCC’s overall mission. The San Francisco SNCC office was therefore allowed to act as it saw fit on behalf of the NFWA.27
One of the first organizers SNCC sent to assist the NFWA was Marshall Ganz, a white staff member originally from Bakersfield, California, thirty miles south of Delano. While a student at Harvard University, Ganz joined the local Friends of SNCC. In 1964 he participated in Mississippi Freedom Summer, during which he worked with Hardy Frye. In September of that year, Ganz dropped out of Harvard to join the SNCC staff. By 1965, Ganz was conducting voter registration work in Amite County, Mississippi and living with E. W. Steptoe, head of the Amite NAACP. Ganz’s interest in the NFWA was piqued when the August 1965 issue of The Movement, which reported the events of the Tulare County rent strike, arrived at Steptoe’s house. Ganz recalled in the introduction to his study of the union,
Although
