Bailey Glasser issued the following announcement on Oct. 7.
Cesar Chavez was a labor leader and civil rights activist who dedicated his life’s work to what he called la causa (the cause): the struggle of farm workers in the United States to improve their working and living conditions through organizing and negotiating contracts with their employers. Born to Mexican parents in Arizona in 1927, Chavez knew first-hand the struggles that farm workers faced when his family moved to California to work the farm fields. Chavez would eventually spend his life savings to create the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) which worked to register new voters and fight racial and economic discrimination. In September 1965, the NFWA launched a strike against California’s grape growers alongside the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee (AWOC), a Filipino-American labor group.
The strike lasted five years and expanded into a nationwide boycott of California grapes. The boycott drew widespread support, thanks to the highly visible campaign headed by Chavez, who led a 340-mile march from Delano to Sacramento in 1966 and undertook a well-publicized 25-day hunger strike in 1968 which eventually ended in the farm workers reaching a collective bargaining agreement with major grape growers that increased the workers’ pay and gave them the right to unionize. Chavez died in his sleep on April 23, 1993, at the age of 66. The following year, President Bill Clinton awarded him a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian award.
Original source can be found here.
