FOXXI: Campaign calls for Obama to award the Medal of Freedom to Fred Ross

Campaign calls for Obama to award the Medal of Freedom to Fred Ross

By Griselda Nevarez

Members of a grassroots campaign are urging President Barack Obama to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom—the country’s highest civilian honor—to the late community organizer Fred Ross.

Some consider Ross one of the nation’s greatest, although unsung, community organizers who pioneered many of the same strategies organizers use today. He spent seven decades as an organizer before he passed away in 1992 at age 82.

Besides helping establish the United Farm Workers of America (UFW) in 1962, Ross was involved in a long list of movements. For example, he ran the federal farm labor camp in California in the late 1930s and helped Japanese Americans return home from the internment camps in the mid 1940s. He also organized African Americans and Latinos across California to battle segregation in the 1940s and early 1950s.

Throughout the years, he advocated for a variety of other causes and inspired many to become organizers. Among those he inspired is his son, Fred Ross Jr., who calls himself “a second-generation organizer.”

Ross Jr. recalled he was 16-years-old when his father took him to a town hall meeting in Guadalupe, Arizona. His father helped a group of residents register a significant number of voters in the town that year. As a result, a member of the board of supervisors met with them to hear their needs, which included basic necessities such as stop signs, a post office and water for the little league field for their town.

“When I experienced that, then I knew what my father was doing was so important, and it made up for the time he had to be away from us,” he told VOXXI. “He was serving people who wanted to fight for themselves, and they needed someone to help teach them do it effectively.”

The campaign to get Fred Ross the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Now, Ross Jr. is leading efforts to convince Obama to award his father the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The award is given every year to about a dozen individuals who “have made especially meritorious contributions to the security or national interests of the United States, to world peace, or to cultural or other significant public or private endeavors.” The names of the award recipients are usually announced in late April.

He said the campaign consists of a website that educates people about his father’s work. There’s also an online petition—created by the UFW—that urges Obama to grant Ross the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Additionally, more than 16o organizers are working in 20 states to call on people to join the campaign and sign the online petition.

Ross Jr. has also been busy reaching out to those who worked with his father and were inspired by him. So far about 300 of them have endorsed the campaign and have written “powerful letters” paying tribute to his father’s work. Among them are nearly 30 labor leaders, more than 60 members of Congress, more than 30 civil rights and advocacy groups, nearly 90 California politicians, nearly 30 immigrant rights leaders and 20 religious leaders, according to the campaign website.

“I wanted to do it to honor his memory and do it the way that he did—one person at a time,” he told VOXXI about why he launched the campaign.

Fred Ross changed Cesar Chavez’s life

Perhaps the most well known organizer who Ross inspired is the late labor leader and civil rights advocate Cesar Chavez, who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994.

“Cesar used to say that his job as an organizer was helping ordinary people do extraordinary things, and Fred taught that to Cesar,” said Marc Grossman, who served as Chavez’s press secretary, speechwriter and personal aid for many years. “What Fred would do and what Cesar also did was get people to believe in themselves.”

Ross had been working as an organizer with the Community Service Organization (CSO) in Los Angeles during the late 1940s before he met Chavez. The organization is best known for pioneering civil rights work against police brutality in California. It’s also known for helping Edward R. Roybal get elected to the Los Angeles City Council in 1949, making him the first Latino to hold that position since 1887.

Ross was looking to open a CSO chapter in San Jose, California, when he first met Chavez in the spring of 1942. They met at a barrio nicknamed Sal Si Puedes (get out if you can), where Chavez was living and working as a community organizer.

Grossman said that, at first, Chavez was “very skeptical” of Ross. That’s because in those days, sociology students came down from Stanford University or the University of California, Berkeley, to study Hispanics living in the barrios. Chavez thought Ross was one of those students but still invited him to speak with neighbors and friends at a house meeting.

“When Fred starting talking about how poor people can empower themselves and create power for themselves, Cesar said Fred was so good at explaining it that he could almost taste it—those were the words Cesar used,” Grossman told VOXXI. “That 20-30 minute meeting changed Cesar’s life.”

That night, after meeting Chavez, Ross wrote in his journal: “I think I’ve found the guy I’ve been looking for.”

The next 40 years following their first encounter, Ross and Chavez became inseparable and close friends. Grossman recalled seeing how Ross “inspired Cesar, taught him, trained him, mentored him and worked by him” until Ross passed away in 1992. Chavez passed away a year later.

In a eulogy for Ross, Chavez wrote that what he most liked about Ross was that there was “no pretensions, no ego gimmicks; just plain hard work—at times grinding work.”

“I watched him at first very closely for the signs of paternalism and superiority,” Chavez went on to say about Ross in the eulogy. “Never, ever did I see any of those signs in Fred. He never looked down on us. But he also never pitied us. He was a tough, unrelenting taskmaster.”

Though Fred Ross inspired thousands, he isn’t well known

Grossman said Chavez wasn’t the only person Ross inspired. He said Ross trained and inspired thousands of more people who “went on to do great things.”

Besides Chavez, Ross inspired labor and civil rights advocate Dolores Huerta and Cruz Reynoso, who was the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice in California. Interestingly, all three of them have been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Huerta received it last year and Reynoso in 2000.

Grossman said he believes Ross hasn’t received the award “because very few people know who Fred is today.” He described Ross as someone who was “very unassuming and a thoroughly humble man.”

Ross Jr. told VOXXI that if his father were alive today and knew about these efforts to get Obama to grant him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he would “sit back and laugh and shake his head.”

“He would never have sought it, and he would never have campaigned for it himself,” Ross Jr. said about the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Rep. Raul Grijalva: ‘There needs to be credit where credit is due’

Though he never worked with Ross, Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Ariz.) said he remembers seeing him in the background as Chavez, Dolores and the rest of the labor leaders fought on the front lines during the farm workers movement.

“He understood that the movement had to be led by the people from the fields, but you see him there and you feel his influence throughout it all,” Grijalva told VOXXI.

The Arizona congressman joined 40 other members of Congress to send a letter to Obama in January, urging the president to award Ross the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He said he signed on to the letter because he admires Ross’s work. He also described the long-time community organizer as someone who was instrumental in “helping organize a group of workers in this country that many felt were powerless.”

“He was part of the growth of the farm workers movement, and I think there needs to be credit where credit is due,” Grijalva said.