for the NFWA to monitor farm owners’ use of scab labor. With the radios, scouts could quickly inform the NFWA office when scabs entered the fields. The union could then send pickets to the fields being worked by scabs. Moreover, as SNCC was well aware, two-way radios could be life-saving apparatus in the face of violence by growers and police. In July 1965 SNCC set up a radio network for the Louisiana chapter of CORE. Three months later SNCC asked Louisiana CORE to return the favor by lending four of the radios to the NFWA. These radios supplemented those sent to Delano from SNCC offices in the South. SNCC not only supplied the radios, but also obtained a business band license for the NFWA to use.37
Even though the national SNCC office supported the strike, it initially appeared detached and uninterested, especially in comparison to the involvement of the San Francisco SNCC office. In November 1965, a frustrated Mike Miller wrote to the national office asking why no one had addressed his repeated requests, which included the addition of George Ballis to the SNCC staff and scholarship money for Hardy Frye so that he could continue working for SNCC. Miller also proposed that Chavez be invited to SNCC’s national staff meeting at the end of the month and that SNCC chairman John Lewis issue a statement in support of the strike, uniting the plights of Mexican American farmworkers and African American sharecroppers and proclaiming that “we, as a civil rights organization, are concerned with the human rights of all people.” Miller received little sympathy from the national headquarters; in a reply sent November 20, a staff member in the national SNCC office, which was responsible for hiring staff, informed him that she did not know who George Ballis was and added, “If we are to request additional salaries, I tend to think that we should take care of the most pressing needs first.” She also noted that SNCC executive secretary James Forman thought that attending the SNCC staff meeting would take Chavez away from the strike for too long, but “if Chaves [sic] wants to come bring him.” No mention was made of a statement from Lewis.38
Despite the aloofness of the SNCC headquarters, Miller worked to ensure that its support for the NFWA not only continued, but increased. At Miller’s invitation, Chavez and Forman spoke at the statewide meeting of California SNCC and Friends of SNCC groups in November 1965. A few days later, Miller and Marshall Ganz attended the national SNCC staff meeting and gave a presentation on the Delano strike as part of a panel on migrant labor organizing. Although Chavez did not attend the meeting, Miller recalled that the SNCC staff members who were present were “curious, interested, very positive.” As a result of their presentation, the SNCC staff voted to give full support to the union and to allow Ganz to represent SNCC on the NFWA staff while still paying him as a SNCC field secretary. The national SNCC office also agreed to provide the farmworkers with extra manpower. In December 1965, a small delegation from SNCC, including Stokely Carmichael, Cleveland Sellers, and Ralph Featherstone, visited Chavez at the NFWA office in Delano to discuss how SNCC could further help the union. After the meeting, the group adjourned to the local hangout, People’s Bar, to drink beer and play pool. Ganz recalled, “Cesar was quite a pool player and so was Stokely and I think they surprised each other.” As a result of this meeting, SNCC sent Richard “Dickie” Flowers, an African American field secretary from Greenwood, Mississippi, to work with Ganz.39
Due to their work in the Deep South, Ganz and Flowers were assigned to organize in Bakersfield, a farming town south of Delano where there were more African American farmworkers than in other parts of the Central Valley. African Americans were a small percentage of farmworkers in both the NFWA and California, but Chavez was committed to organizing them as well. In an attempt to prevent workers from joining together to demand higher wages and better working conditions, growers separated workers by race. Organizing African American farmworkers, then, would create a sense of multiracial solidarity among the farmworkers and reduce strike breaking. Chavez explained, “Discrimination is bad for all the moral reasons, but it is also bad for reasons of unity. It can quickly destroy the Movement.” Chavez’s commitment to multiracial equality derived from his experience with the CSO. In the early 1950s, most members of the San Jose, California, chapter left after the president, Chavez’s sister Rita, attempted to punish a member for not allowing African Americans in his restaurant. Although the chapter nearly dissolved, Chavez stood by his sister’s decision: “We had a very strong commitment to civil rights. But if we wanted civil rights for us, then we certainly had to respect the rights of blacks, Jews, and other minorities.” The understanding that both Mexican Americans and African Americans experienced discrimination based on race and class thus infused the activities of the NFWA from its founding and predated the involvement of SNCC. The civil rights organization, however, was able to lend its experience in organizing African Americans in the South, many of whom were agricultural workers, to aid the union’s cause.40
In organizing African American farmworkers in Bakersfield, Ganz and Flowers utilized SNCC’s strategies, such as field secretaries working in interracial pairs. When conducting voter registration in Mississippi, for example, SNCC volunteers canvassed in interracial pairs to prevent local African Americans from facetiously agreeing to register to vote just to appease (and get rid of) the white organizer. However, Ganz and Flowers also learned and employed the organizing techniques developed by Chavez, such as the house meeting. By combining the organizing strategies of SNCC and the NFWA, Ganz and Flowers were able to recruit African American farmworkers, as well as white and Puerto Rican ones, to the union. Mack Lyons, a black farmworker who had migrated to Bakersfield from Texas in 1965, first noticed Ganz and Flowers passing out leaflets outside the DiGiorgio Corporation’s Arvin Ranch in Bakersfield: “We stopped and talked. I gave Marshall my address, and I asked him if he could come by my house that night. He and Richard Flowers almost beat me there.” Although Lyons did not join the NFWA that day, he joined at the next house meeting and went on to become one of the union’s foremost organizers.41
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SNCC’s involvement with the farmworkers intensified beginning in December 1965 when Chavez asked Mike Miller to coordinate a national boycott of Schenley Industries, a liquor company that owned one of the largest of the ranches being struck by the NFWA. The boycott had been the idea of Jim Drake, who took his cue from the civil rights movement: “Blacks used to boycott stores that wouldn’t hire them. So we decided to try it.” Chavez and Drake both recognized the effectiveness of the economic boycott as a weapon for civil rights, which had been employed so effectively during the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the earlier “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns. Although the Schenley boycott addressed the low wages and unsafe working conditions of the farmworkers rather than exclusion from employment, like these earlier examples, it demonstrated the connection between racial and economic inequality and therefore dovetailed with SNCC’s civil rights activism. The NFWA’s boycott of Schenley Industries took full advantage of SNCC’s skills, as well as its network of field secretaries and supporters. In fact, the decision to boycott Schenley came about after Chavez asked SNCC volunteers to research the connections of the Delano growers. The SNCC volunteers discovered that Schenley distributed well-known whiskeys such as Cutty Sark, as well as wine made with Delano grapes. Drake, Chavez, Miller and others recognized that Schenley products would be effective boycott targets because Americans could easily identify the company’s brands, as opposed to those of grapes.42
Even before the boycott began, SNCC was able to use its notoriety to gain publicity for the farmworkers’ fight against Schenley. Two months before the NFWA announced the boycott, SNCC began weekly picket lines in front of the company’s San Francisco offices. On discovering the pickets, Schenley executives wrongly assumed SNCC wanted the company to hire more African Americans. They quickly informed various civil rights organizations that they had a “Negro Vice-President.” The Movement reported, “On learning that the issue was not their treatment of Negroes, but their treatment of Mexican-Americans, they had nothing to say.” Once the boycott began, SNCC helped spread it nationwide through publicity in The Movement.43
The spread of the Schenley boycott nationwide enabled SNCC and Friends of SNCC chapters outside California to participate. The New York SNCC office was particularly helpful to the boycott because Schenley’s national headquarters were in that city and the local SNCC office could therefore put constant pressure on the company. In early December, Wendy Goepel Brooks visited New York SNCC and suggested that both SNCC and the local CORE chapter coordinate