Today let us honor a U.S. hero for the farmworkers

By JAMES C. HARRINGTON

March 30, 2010, 8:32PM

Associated Press file

César Chávez, leader of the United Farm Workers union, in 1975.
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Today is the birthday of César Chávez, a holiday in eight states. Parks, cultural centers, libraries, schools and streets carry his name in cities across Texas and the United States.
Someday his birthday will be a holiday in Texas also, recognizing him as a civil rights hero and a labor leader for one of the most abused and exploited group of workers, many of whom live in Texas.
Chávez, like Mohandas Gandhi and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., was a spiritual figure, a crusader for nonviolent social change. Like Gandhi and King, Chávez used peaceful tactics such as fasts, boycotts, strikes and pilgrimages. When he died in 1993, at age 66, more than 50,000 of us marched in his funeral under a hot Delano, Calif., sun. People felt his love and, in turn, showed him their love. I saw this a hundred times in my work with him; it was an honor.
Education was always a priority for Chávez because, after eighth grade, he had to leave school to work in the fields as a migrant laborer to support his family. Although his formal education was incomplete, Chávez had great intellectual curiosity; he read widely throughout his life, and there were few limits to what he taught himself.
After serving in the U.S. Navy, Chávez became an organizer with the Community Service Organization, a prominent Latino civil rights group. He coordinated voter registration drives and directed campaigns against racial and economic discrimination.
Chávez, however, wanted to build an organization to protect and serve farmworkers, whose poverty and disenfranchisement he had shared as a youngster. He left CSO in 1962 to found the National Farm Workers Association, which later became the United Farm Workers of America.
For more than three decades, Chávez led the first successful farmworkers union in U.S. history, achieving dignity, respect, fair wages, medical coverage, pension benefits, humane working conditions and other protections for hundreds of thousands of farm laborers. He led successful strikes and boycotts that won the first industrywide labor contracts in American agriculture.
His impact on Texans was enormous. It extended far beyond the thousands of Texas farm laborers who worked as migrants in California. His efforts to open wide the doors of colleges and universities to the Hispanic community reached deep into Texas and, in turn, opened to doors to greater economic opportunity.
Chávez’s life transcends any one cause or struggle. He was a unique and humble leader who inspired millions of Americans — and Texans — to seek social justice and civil rights for poor and disenfranchised people in our society. Chávez helped do this by forging an extraordinary national coalition of students, middle-class consumers, trade unionists, religious groups and minority people here in Texas and throughout the nation.
Chávez’s life cannot be measured in material terms. He never earned more than $6,000 a year, never owned a house. Rather, we measure his life as a person who stood for — and worked for — equality, justice and dignity for all Americans. As Robert Kennedy once said, Chávez was “one of the heroic figures of our time.”
We celebrate his birthday not just to honor him, but as an opportunity to recommit ourselves to the same struggle to make our community, our state and our country a better place for our children and grandchildren — and to hold out that promise for all humankind.
Harrington is director of the Texas Civil Rights Project, a nonprofit foundation that promotes civil rights and economic and racial justice throughout Texas through education and litigation.