To March for Others. Lauren Araiza
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proclaimed, “They’re not even a union. They’re a civil rights organization.” Growers were alarmed by the NFWA’s popularity as a movement, prompting one to declare, “This isn’t a strike, it’s a revolution.” But despite the NFWA’s efforts to position la causa as a movement and the willingness of others to view it as such, it was still a labor union whose most basic goal was representation of its workers. By joining the AFL-CIO, the NFWA made it more difficult for SNCC to think of it as a social justice movement rather than part of organized labor. As one NFWA volunteer told John Gregory Dunne, “The romance is gone.”14
Although SNCC was critical of the NFWA for joining the AFL-CIO to become the UFWOC, it continued to support and assist the union in its struggles with Delano grape growers. Soon after the victorious DiGiorgio election, workers at A. Perelli-Minetti & Sons, almost all of whom were UFWOC members, went on strike September 9, 1966 to obtain wages and benefits similar to those guaranteed in the union’s contract with Schenley Industries. Perelli-Minetti was a small wine grape grower in Delano that was not struck in September 1965 because it did not grow table grapes. The forty-eight workers asked the UFWOC to represent them in negotiations with the growers and the union immediately agreed. SNCC was intimately involved in these negotiations; Marshall Ganz and Dolores Huerta met with the owners of Perelli-Minetti and proposed an election for union recognition. Less than a week later, while the UFWOC waited for Perelli-Minetti to decide on its proposal, the Teamsters crossed the picket line to sign a “sweetheart” contract (one more beneficial to the employer than to the workers) with the ranch. The involvement of the Teamsters served to escalate, rather than end, the conflict between Perelli-Minetti and the UFWOC. Although the striking workers numbered fewer than fifty, the UFWOC decided that it had to act in order to prevent the Teamsters from establishing a solid foothold in the grape-growing industry. Consequently, the UFWOC declared a nationwide boycott of Perelli-Minetti products on September 20.15
Although the Perelli-Minetti strike was gaining momentum, the boycott could not get underway for another two months. The labor dispute with DiGiorgio had not been completely resolved, and because of the UFWOC’s limited resources the union could not afford to be involved in both conflicts at the same time. The issue at hand was now DiGiorgio’s Arvin Ranch in Bakersfield, which had not previously been struck. Most Arvin workers had wanted elections the previous August, during the early harvest season, but DiGiorgio refused. The Arvin workers therefore pushed for elections in October during another peak in harvesting and before many migrant workers left to work in other areas. SNCC was particularly helpful in organizing the workers at Arvin for the UFWOC because many were African American or white migrants. Mack Lyons, an African American farmworker who had been recruited to the union by SNCC members Ganz and Dickie Flowers, was elected to represent the Arvin workers to the company. In recruiting Lyons, Flowers and Ganz succeeded in applying SNCC’s organizing principles of identifying and cultivating local leadership.16
Figure 4. DiGiorgio workers line up to register to vote in the election for union representation. Photo by Jon Lewis. Courtesy of the Farmworker Movement Documentation Project, http://www.farmworkermovement.org.
SNCC was also involved when UFWOC organizers, including Lyons, traveled to DiGiorgio’s San Francisco headquarters to personally demand that company President Robert DiGiorgio agree to an election. The protest at DiGiorgio headquarters revealed that the relationship between the union and SNCC was still quite close. While UFWOC organizers waited inside to meet with DiGiorgio, a picket line of over 200 supporters marched outside the building and El Teatro Campesino, a theater group affiliated with the UFWOC, performed strike songs. During the demonstration someone unfurled a sixty-two-foot banner from the roof of the building that employed a SNCC slogan: “DiGiorgio—One Man One Vote—Workers Demand Elections.” Inside, police arrested Terry Cannon, editor of The Movement, along with Lyons and six UFWOC and AFL-CIO officials for entering the DiGiorgio offices and refusing to leave until they were granted a meeting with the president of the corporation. The arrests of Cannon and the labor leaders were broadcast from San Francisco stations on that evening’s news. Rather than risk additional bad press, DiGiorgio agreed to an election when UFWOC organizers returned to the DiGiorgio offices the next morning (including those arrested, who had posted bail). The next day the Teamsters announced it would withdraw from the Arvin election. On November 4 the UFWOC won the right to represent the Arvin workers and negotiate a contract on their behalf. SNCC participation in the demonstration at DiGiorgio headquarters was crucial to this victory, as was its success in organizing African American farmworkers at Arvin. Huerta later asserted, “We wouldn’t have won the Arvin election if it hadn’t been for the Okie and black votes.”17
With the victory at DiGiorgio’s Arvin ranch, the UFWOC could proceed against Perelli-Minetti. Beginning in November, the union called for boycotts of Tribuno Vermouth, Eleven Cellars Brandy, and other Perelli-Minetti products. 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
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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