The Crusades of Cesar Chavez (37 page)

The boycotters dispersed. Violence flared between Teamsters and Chavistas. After a UFW picket was arrested in connection with a shooting in Santa Maria, Jerry Cohen wrote in his diary: “Manuel Chavez is not controlling (I suspect he is encouraging) the violence of the people. My fear is that there will be retaliation
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against members of our union and Cesar.” Dolores Huerta was trying to negotiate contracts with two companies that had agreed to recognize the union, Freshpict and D’Arrigo, but talks broke down. Kircher and Higgins expressed frustration with the UFW’s intransigence. Higgins sent Chavez a telegram to try to goad him into taking charge. “Kircher shares my view that Dolores has mismanaged
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the negotiations—to put it mildly,” Higgins wrote to Monsignor Mahony.

Kircher was perturbed about Huerta’s involvement for another reason. He had found out she was six months pregnant. An unwed pregnant woman as the lead negotiator and key figure in the union was a major crisis, Kircher told Cohen. Kircher hoped Chavez would remove Huerta from her public role, before news of her pregnancy spread. For Cohen and others in the union, the situation was more complicated: Huerta had become involved with Richard Chavez. Their relationship, kept quiet for some time, became public during her pregnancy. Many women, Helen Chavez chief among them, were livid. Richard’s wife, Sally, had been Helen’s close friend since childhood. The betrayal seemed particularly cruel because Sally had never recovered from the trauma of losing their eldest son in a car accident a few years earlier. Richard, in his grief, had turned to Huerta. “One of the interesting events to contemplate is the confrontation between Dolores and Cesar if that ever took place,” Cohen speculated in his journal about Huerta’s pregnancy. “Perhaps Cesar is waiting for Dolores to tell him. A confession?”
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The new liaison became a subject of widespread gossip, and Helen voiced her anger to many people. Two of Richard and Sally’s daughters showed up in the union office and roughed-up Dolores.
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But Huerta and Chavez’s relationship survived, and she relinquished none of her power within the union.

With the boycotters settled in cities around the United States, Chavez announced his next target—the Bud Antle company, which shipped $25 million worth of lettuce a year. Union researchers had dug up some tenuous connections to Dow Chemical, which produced the napalm used by the United States in the Vietnam War. Pictures of Vietnamese women and children disfigured by napalm bombs had triggered anti-Dow protests on college campuses. Antle was one of the three big lettuce growers in the valley, and the Dow Chemical connection, however distant, made the company an attractive boycott target.

Bud Antle, who gave his name to the company, was known as an innovator who often broke with the pack. Rather than hire braceros for certain field work, he had signed a contract in 1961 with the Teamsters. For that treachery he was thrown out of the Grower-Shipper Association. Antle’s contract with the Teamsters had not covered workers who hoed, thinned, irrigated, and drove tractors. But when other growers signed Teamster contracts, Antle hurriedly extended his pact to cover all agricultural workers. He took the lead among the growers fighting Chavez in court,
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charging that a strike would cost his company $100,000 a day.

When Chavez suspended the strike, Antle went back to court and obtained an injunction on October 8 ordering the union to stop boycotting his produce. When the UFW showed no sign of complying, Antle asked for a bond to protect against the company’s losses. On November 17, Judge Gordon Campbell ordered UFWOC to post a $2 million bond. The union ignored that, too.

Six days later, Antle’s attorneys met with Chavez to take his deposition. Just before the lunch break, Chavez was asked whether the union was boycotting Antle lettuce. He readily confirmed the boycott and volunteered that the union had every intention of continuing. Antle’s lawyer immediately took that statement to a judge. When the deposition resumed shortly after 1:00 p.m. at the Royal Palms Motel in Bakersfield, Chavez was handed an order to appear in court to answer contempt charges for defying the anti-boycott injunction. He could not have been more pleased.

At the end of the nine-hour deposition, Cohen gleefully warned Antle’s attorneys that they would be treated to a repeat of the scene at the Bakersfield courthouse in 1968, when Chavez had appeared on the thirteenth day of his fast, accompanied by thousands of farmworkers. Chavez chimed in: “You see, the only way we can get the fact that we are being persecuted
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by Bud Antle and Dow Chemical is to have our people get it on the cameras and let the people throughout the country react to that. That is the only defense we have. We wouldn’t do it, but I don’t see what else we can do. I also want to have them there because if I go to jail I want them to witness. They get pretty upset and they want to go on the boycott, and we want to use the public awareness of the persecution.”

Chavez flew to New York, where he appealed for support to two thousand Sunday morning worshippers at Riverside Church. Addressing the nondenominational service in the Gothic cathedral in his customary attire—plaid shirt, olive pants, and work boots—he asked them not to buy lettuce without the black eagle on the label and called nonviolence “truly the essence of Christ’s teaching.”
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The next day, he delivered the St. Thomas Aquinas lecture to a packed auditorium at Manhattan College, then debated the vice president of the growers association on the
Today
show. On Thursday, December 3, Chavez arrived back in Salinas, so tired he could barely keep his eyes open. Due in court the next morning on the contempt charge, he huddled with his lawyers at the sparsely furnished apartment of Bill Carder, a recent addition to the legal team. Carder had read Peter Matthiessen’s profile in the
New Yorker
, gone to see Chavez speak, and run into his old law school classmate Jerry Cohen. Within weeks, Carder was in Salinas, his living room dominated by the big red IBM typewriter he used to prepare dozens of court filings.

Just as Cohen had promised, hundreds of farmworkers stretched out the next morning in a mile-long march from the union office at 14 South Wood Street to the massive concrete courthouse. For three and a half hours, men, women, and children stood and knelt silently in the courtyard and hallways on all three courthouse floors.

Inside Judge Campbell’s chambers,
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attorneys for both sides asked that the hearing be postponed. AFL-CIO president George Meany had set up a meeting the next day with the Teamsters and they thought the dispute might be resolved. Belatedly, Antle’s attorney had recognized Chavez’s ploy. He did not want to see Chavez in jail, “possibly causing national repercussions,” Richard Maltzman told the judge.

Judge Campbell listened impatiently. No agreement reached between the parties outside of court would affect the question of whether Chavez had flagrantly violated the judge’s order: “The question still remains as to whether or not there has been a contempt of court,” he told the lawyers. He ordered the case to proceed.

Chavez sat in the courtroom and listened as his lawyers argued that the judge’s order was confusing and impossible to obey. Ultimately they rested their case on the same legal argument they had presented in fighting the injunction. The order “was in excess of the court’s jurisdiction and unconstitutional,” Carder told the packed courtroom. Chavez had the right to discuss the labor dispute and to tell people Antle’s workers were not represented by the union of their choice. “That is pure speech,” Carder said, “and if that is not protected by the First Amendment, I don’t know what is!”

When Maltzman gave a convoluted response, Cohen and Carder laughed, and Campbell admonished them for unbecoming conduct. The union put on no witnesses; no evidence would change the fundamental question of constitutionality, Carder argued.

Maltzman swore himself in as a witness and testified that Chavez had told him the union would continue to boycott Antle lettuce and had tied the company to Dow Chemical for the sole purpose of harming Antle. “We know that Mr. Chavez has the power and the ability to call these people off,” Maltzman said in his closing statement. Rather than see Chavez in jail, getting the publicity once accorded Martin Luther King Jr., Maltzman asked the judge to set Chavez free and order him to return to court the following week with a notice calling off the boycott.

Campbell recessed only briefly before he delivered a ruling he had drafted in advance. “No man or organization is above or below the law,” the judge began. He briefly reviewed the facts and concluded Chavez was clearly in contempt. Campbell ordered the labor leader jailed for ten days on three counts of violating the order and held indefinitely until Chavez ordered an end to the Antle boycott. “Mr. Chavez shall remain in the county jail until that notification has been proven to have been done,” Campbell told the audience.

“If an objective is a noble objective,” the judge concluded, “and many people can say there is a noble objective here, improper and evil methods cannot be justified to achieve those noble ends and objectives.” With that he remanded Chavez to the custody of the Monterey County sheriff.

Deputies took Chavez one block north on Alisal Street and booked him
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into the Monterey County jail. His black pants, blue shirt, and work boots were deposited in Locker #216. He declined an offer for special treatment and donned the regulation prison denim. His cell was in the rear of the second floor, so he could not see the round-the-clock vigils that began immediately in the parking lot across from the entrance to the Gothic Revival–style jail. A truck decked out with flowers and a brown-and-gold Our Lady of Guadalupe became a shrine. When darkness fell, votive candles lit the night.

Helen Chavez arrived for a brief visit the next morning, bringing her husband a book on Gandhi. They spoke on a telephone, sitting on opposite sides of a glass wall. Afterward she read a short statement from Cesar to the crowd across the street: “I am fine and in good spirits. They are being very kind to me. I was spiritually prepared for this confinement.” The workers must have their choice of union, he said. “Jail is a small price
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to pay to help right that injustice.”

Chavez’s incarceration quickly exposed a national audience to the ugly fissures that split Salinas. As in so many communities that revolved around agriculture, the farm worker movement posed both an economic threat and a challenge to the social order. Mexican farmworkers were suddenly visible, empowered, and making demands on a system whose Anglo leaders had relegated them to the lowest possible status. Farmworkers wanted not only better working conditions and pay; they wanted health care, education for their children, dignity, and respect. As Chavez had declared on the
Today
show: “These workers are all brown and black workers
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and they want our union. They don’t want to be led by white men who don’t understand their needs.”

On Chavez’s third night in jail, Robert F. Kennedy’s widow, Ethel, arrived for a visit and rally. Hundreds of angry Salinas residents turned out to protest, waving American flags and signs that read carpet bagger and kennedy go home. Ethel Kennedy marched
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in a candlelight procession down Alisal Street to the shrine across the street from the jail, where thousands of farmworkers gathered to celebrate mass. They sang “De Colores,” the movement’s unofficial anthem, to drown out the rhythmic chants from the crowd: “Reds go home, reds go home.”

Kennedy placed a candle on the altar and climbed on the flatbed truck, adorned with a Mexican flag, a huelga flag, and four American flags, one at each corner. The Rev. James McEntee celebrated mass, lit only by the spotlights from a dozen television cameras. “We are here today to seek justice for the campesino,” the priest prayed, and the crowd across the street booed loudly. “We are here to seek justice for all mankind. We are here to ask prayers, the help of God, for our leader Cesar Chavez.” The farmworkers’ applause drowned out the protests, and workers lined up to take communion at the base of the truck.

Kennedy held a candle and smiled grimly as she walked toward the jail, accompanied by Huerta and Olympic decathlon champion Rafer Johnson. The farmworkers sang “Bendito Sea Dios,” a Mexican hymn, and the chants along her path changed to “Ethel go home, Ethel go home.” Boos echoed off the concrete walls of the courthouse as she entered the jail around 7:15 p.m. After a ten-minute visit, she left through a back door to avoid the gauntlet of protesters. Cohen visited Chavez later and reported that he was pleased by the account of the scene outside. “He’s going to be in there as long as it takes,” Cohen said. “He’s feeling fine. He’s perfectly happy in there and he thinks he can continue.” When reporters pressed Cohen on how soon the courts might spring his client, the lawyer could barely stifle a grin. Chavez wanted to stay right where he was.

With Chavez in the national news, the boycotters went to work. A quote of dubious origin, attributed to Chavez as he was taken to jail, became the new mantra: “Boycott Antle, boycott Dow, boycott the hell out of them!” Jessica Govea worked as a boycott coordinator and sent daily updates to cities around the United States. A Dow executive sat on the Antle board, and years earlier Dow had produced cellophane wrappers for the Antle lettuce; that was enough for the boycotters to invoke the much-maligned company as they urged consumers to avoid Bud Antle lettuce.

Chavez’s willingness to endure imprisonment on their behalf moved even workers who had been cautious about the movement. Chava Bustamante worked in the lettuce fields, hating every minute. Their father had taken Chava and his older brother Mario to a union meeting when Chavez first came to Salinas. The other two had been enthusiastic converts, but Chava had been skeptical. Seeing Chavez in jail won him over. “Our hearts at this moment are heavy and full of sadness to see the injustice that has been done to you by a judge who does not understand the cause of the workers,” read a December 8 petition signed by dozens of farmworkers. “We know that no matter how many obstacles they try to put in your path, they will not be able to find a way of stopping your fight for justice and respect for all of us, we who have suffered so much in the camps of exploitation. Cesar, we want you to know in these moments of suffering, our hearts are with you, and that our faith is so great, we are firm in our conviction that you will triumph once again for the good of the workers. We are with you till the end.”
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