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On May 12, 1972, Mexican American labor organizer and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez begins a hunger strike. The strike, which he undertook in opposition to an Arizona law severely restricting farm workers’ ability to organize, lasted 24 days and drew national attention to the suffering of itinerant farm workers in the Southwest.
A fervent admirer of Mahatma Gandhi, Chavez had undertaken several hunger strikes before. As a co-founder of the United Farm Workers, he and his strikes had played important roles in many major labor actions, including the five-year Delano Grape Strike in California. In response to the wave of organizing that had swept the region, Arizona’s legislature passed a bill that constricted workers’ rights to organize, outlawed secondary boycotts, and allowed growers to obtain a restraining order to prevent strikes during the harvest. Despite an outcry from farm workers and Chavez’s request that they meet to discuss the bill, Governor Jack Williams immediately signed it into law. Later that day, Chavez began his fast.
An increasingly emaciated Chavez appeared regularly at mass, attended by his supporters and others from the civil rights movement. Coretta Scott King, whose husband Martin Luther King Jr. had supported Chavez in his previous strikes, attended one such mass, as did Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern. Chavez referred to the strike as “a fast of sacrifice,” repeatedly reminding observers that his suffering was meant to represent the daily suffering of farm workers. Finally, after 24 days, he ended his fast at a memorial mass for Bobby Kennedy, who had thrown his political support behind Chavez’s cause in the years prior to his 1968 assassination. The following year, Chavez and the UFW organized another major agricultural strike, the Lettuce Growers Strike, and in 1975 California passed a landmark law affirming workers’ rights to boycott and to collective bargaining.
Am I supposed to celebrate this?????
It’s that exact kind of leftist/collectivist agitprop that has pushed this country ever leftward.STARTING with jerks like Chavez!
That there is an ELEMENTARY school in OKC that bears his name is all you need to know…..
… and probably 100,000 miles of city streets named after him in every blue city … and just how much did that cost US?
egregious mistreatment of workers, not smart enough to do any better for themselves was real. getting realer again. might as well shitcan Steinbeck, too, his oeuvre being the same.
I’d have shot him…
prolly you’d a’ shot yourself. again.
He was against allowing illegal immigration
Mom was born in 1908 on a fruit ranch close to the Utah/Colorado state line. They had a couple Hispanic ranch hands year round and would put on itenerant workers as the harvest progressed. If the harvest was lean the next year would be lean. If the bunkhouse was full that meant a good crop was at hand and everyone would be rewarded for their hard labor. No organizing was needed nor would it likely have been tolerated. Nothing would get her ire up like the mention in later years of the name Cesar Chavez.