As the 50th anniversary of Cesar Chavez’s decision to build the United Farm Workers approaches in 2012, it is disturbing that a few critics still accuse him of condoning violence. That’s one of many inaccuracies in Mark Day’s Dec. 14 commentary, "Cesar Chavez: Separating the man from the myth."

When some grape strikers considered responding in kind to grower violence, Cesar fasted for 25 days in 1968, risking his life until all strikers recommitted to nonviolence. Sen. Robert F. Kennedy was by his side at the fast’s conclusion, calling Cesar "one of the heroic figures of our time." Everyone who witnessed Cesar’s suffering knows it was not a publicity stunt.

Because of his moral credibility from that fast, after strikers Nagi Daifallah and Juan de la Cruz were killed during new grape walkouts in August 1973, Cesar personally went around confiscating weapons from strikers outraged by their colleagues’ deaths. Fearing further violence, he called off the ’73 strike — against the wishes of many union leaders-and resorted to what Gandhi called the greatest nonviolent weapon by dispatching strikers and their families across North America to organize the second successful grape boycott that produced California’s pioneering 1975 Agricultural Labor Relations Act.

Allegations that Cesar tolerated violence are patently false. Many of Day’s other claims also demand correction. Here are just a few.

With anti-immigrant tea partiers sometimes claiming Cesar supported their views, the fact is that the UFW organized undocumented workers and championed immigration reform decades before most unions acted similarly. When there were calls in the early 1970s for the UFW to check the legal status of workers at ranches under union contract, Cesar refused. "Our job," he said, "is to represent good, hard-working people whoever they are."

In 1973, the UFW was one of the first unions to oppose a federal law making it illegal to hire undocumented workers. The UFW’s Dolores Huerta crafted provisions of the 1986 U.S. immigration law allowing 1 million workers to become legal residents. The UFW sponsored the historic bipartisan AgJobs bill now before Congress letting undocumented U.S. farm workers stay by continuing to work in agriculture.

Cesar and Arturo Rodriguez, his successor as UFW president, led major field strikes by asparagus and grape workers in the late 1980s and early 1990s, just before Cesar’s death in 1993. Recent years have seen significant UFW organizing and negotiating triumphs, including union contracts in California with the nation’s largest strawberry and vegetable growers, its biggest winery and 75 percent of the fresh mushroom industry. Other new contracts protect workers at the biggest U.S. dairy and huge cattle feed lots.

Union membership is growing, but growers still sternly resist unionization. Recently, 80 percent of workers at giant Bakersfield-based Giumarra Vineyards Corp., mostly undocumented, signed petitions saying they wanted the UFW. Seven days later, the union barely lost the state-held election. A year later, the Agricultural Labor Relations Board invalidated the election because of serious violations by the Giumarras.

John Wilhelm, president of the UNITE-HERE international union, said, "The UFW’s recent history shows remarkable success in the toughest organizing job in America."

Cesar’s different brand of organizing did spur opposition from inside the UFW such as in 1968, when some strikers and staff left over his insistence on nonviolence. The 1970s witnessed another internal political fight, between those who wanted the UFW to become a conventional business union and others led by Cesar, who had a different vision for the UFW as a movement that produces for union members but also transcends traditional trade unionism to embrace challenges and solutions outside the workplace for farm workers and a larger emerging working class Latino community. Although he was, and continues to be, bitterly attacked by his critics for his position, Cesar won that fight too.

Marc Grossman was Cesar Chavez’s longtime personal aide and spokesman. He is presently communications director for the Cesar Chavez Foundation.