Biography
Cesar Estrada Chavez was the co-founder, with Dolores Huerta, of the United Farm Workers and the most prominent Mexican-American labor leader and civil-rights organizer of the 20th century. Born to a Yuma, Arizona farm family who lost their land during the Depression and became migrant farmworkers, he served in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific in World War II and afterwards spent the 1950s as a community organizer for Saul Alinsky's Community Service Organization. In 1962 he founded what became the United Farm Workers and built it into a national organization through the Delano grape strike (1965–1970), which forced the first significant union contracts in California agriculture.
On December 4, 1970 he was arrested in Salinas, California by Monterey County Superior Court Judge Gordon Campbell for refusing to comply with a court injunction against the UFW's secondary boycott of the Bud Antle lettuce growers. He was held at the Monterey County Jail in Salinas from December 10 to December 24, 1970 — released only when the California Supreme Court ordered his release on Christmas Eve. While he was in jail, Coretta Scott King and Ethel Kennedy made widely publicized visits, and tens of thousands of supporters held nightly rosary vigils outside the jail.
He was arrested in numerous other actions across his organizing life. His leadership combined labor militancy with religious nonviolence and the public hunger strike (most famously his 25-day fast in 1968 and his 36-day fast in 1988) as a tool of moral pressure. He died in San Luis, Arizona on April 23, 1993. He was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994.
