In Spanish, Martínez spoke for SNCC when she proclaimed, “We are with you and we are proud of your march and your victory because it is a victory for all the poor of the world.”1
Along the highway leading through the heart of California’s breadbasket, Martínez was far from SNCC’s organizational base in the Deep South. However, SNCC’s participation in and endorsement of the Delano to Sacramento march marked the high point of the alliance that had formed between the civil rights organization and the farmworkers union. Beginning in early 1965, SNCC and the NFWA came together in a productive relationship that demonstrated both organizations’ profound understanding—based on hardwon experience—of the connection between racial discrimination and economic oppression. The NFWA recognized that California’s largely Mexican American farm laborers were both discriminated against as racial minorities and economically exploited by the state’s agribusiness corporations. Therefore the NFWA confronted both forms of oppression in its endeavors. In its pursuit of racial equality on behalf of African Americans in the Deep South, SNCC also challenged America’s economic caste system, which it saw as antithetical to a democratic society. SNCC’s intent to confront not only American racial mores and the political system, but also the nation’s economic and class structure, set it apart from other civil rights organizations. Therefore, the support that SNCC demonstrated for the farmworkers was characteristic of the organization and its ideals about race and class.2
This shared understanding of the connection between racial discrimination and economic oppression formed the basis of the alliance between SNCC and the NFWA because it enabled them to recognize that African Americans and Mexican Americans were victims of the same oppressive forces and led them to see the benefits of a multiracial coalition. On top of this ideological foundation, common organizational praxis of the two groups further facilitated their alliance. However, these factors only led to a coalition between SNCC and the NFWA because of the leadership of individuals who recognized the potential in such a relationship. The resulting alliance enabled each organization to expand its mission and activism by applying its principles across racial lines. As Martínez told the marchers, “It is necessary that blacks and Mexicans see that there is only one cause—justice.”3
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SNCC’s founding reveals the degree to which the organization incorporated economic power in its fight for racial equality. In April 1960, black and white students gathered at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, at the invitation of Ella Baker and SCLC, who wanted to harness the energy of the student-led sit-ins of lunch counters and restaurants that had swept the South since the sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February of that year. These sit-ins were conducted with the knowledge that African Americans possessed economic power as consumers that could be used as a weapon against racial discrimination. Franklin McCain, who as a student at North Carolina A&T College participated in the sit-in at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, explained that they targeted that store because they were allowed—and encouraged—to purchase goods, but were not permitted to eat at the lunch counter: “They tell you to come in: ‘Yes, buy the toothpaste; yes, come in and buy the notebook paper . . . .No, we don’t separate your money in this cash register, but no, please don’t step down to the hot dog stand...’ The whole system, of course, was unjust, but that just seemed like insult added to injury.” By recognizing their power as consumers, the students began to dismantle the system of racial segregation in southern public accommodations. Baker was concerned that the energy and power that the students had demonstrated would dissipate once they achieved their goal of access and integration. Founding SNCC member Julian Bond recalled that Baker thought that the student sit-in movement “had narrow vision and thought the whole world was nothing but lunch counters.” The founding of SNCC at the meeting at Shaw University was thus an attempt to institutionalize the students’ use of economic power to combat racial discrimination.4
As SNCC grew and evolved, it fought for racial equality through direct action tactics (such as sit-ins and marches) and through voter registration among African Americans, primarily in the Deep South. Through their efforts in their fight against racial discrimination, SNCC workers were exposed to the economic inequality and exploitation of African Americans. By living and working in small towns in the rural Deep South, SNCC “field secretaries” (the term given to those who organized for SNCC full time) witnessed firsthand the crippling poverty experienced by most African Americans in the region. Furthermore, some SNCC organizers had grown up in rural southern towns and brought their intertwined experiences of poverty and racism to their activism. For example, SNCC field secretary and Mississippi native Lawrence Guyot explained that when African Americans in Greenwood, Mississippi attempted to register to vote, “the county decided that what it would do was it would cut off all welfare supplies. So it did just that. All food was cut off.” Ivanhoe Donaldson, who organized for SNCC in the Mississippi Delta town of Clarksdale, elaborated that when plantation workers tried to register to vote or organize others to do so, “plantation owners were not only being hostile in terms of pushing people off the plantation, but were economically isolating people from credit at stores or from banks.” SNCC workers therefore drew a direct connection between gaining the vote, racial equality, and economic justice.5
The treatment of black sharecroppers was remarkably similar to that of Mexican American farmworkers in California. Like African Americans in the South, racial discrimination against Mexican Americans directly affected their opportunities for employment and economic advancement. In the West’s agricultural areas, such as the fertile Central Valley, many worked as migrant farm laborers. The high numbers of Mexican Americans in agriculture resulted from labor policies influenced by racism. Many growers encouraged the government recruitment of Mexicans, whom they stereotyped as docile and obedient, which they argued made them ideally suited for farm labor. Some believed that Mexicans were also uniquely physically adapted to agricultural work. Echoing earlier justifications of the enslavement of Africans, a prominent landowner in California asserted in the Saturday Evening Post in 1928, “Mexican casual labor fills the requirement of the California farm as no other labor has done in the past. The Mexican withstands the high temperatures of the Imperial and San Joaquin valleys.” Paradoxically, employers also claimed that Mexicans were lazy and irresponsible and that they should therefore be paid less than other workers. Similarly, southern planters argued that African Americans were lazy and “shiftless,” which justified both low wages and strict white control and supervision. Furthermore, Mexicans were desirable as workers because—due to racial biases against them and the proximity of the border—they were easily deported when their labor was no longer needed, as was the case during the Great Depression. The growers also opened themselves up to the charge of discrimination against Mexican Americans by their indifference toward the unhealthy and dangerous working conditions to which farmworkers were exposed, including extreme temperatures, lack of fresh water and restrooms in the fields, and the use of hazardous pesticides.6
California farmworkers had made several attempts to organize and improve their conditions. For example, in 1928 the Confederación de Uniones Obreras (Federation of Labor Unions) was founded in Los Angeles and promptly organized a strike of cantaloupe workers in the Imperial Valley in Southern California. In the thirteen years following that strike, Mexican American workers organized themselves into unions and conducted strikes in the lettuce, pea, berry, beet, cotton, citrus, celery, and bean fields throughout California in pursuit of higher wages and improved working conditions. However, growers had successfully crushed these efforts through race riots and murders and by firing, evicting, and deporting workers who attempted to organize or strike. Similarly, sharecroppers’ attempts to organize in Arkansas and Alabama in the 1930s were met with evictions, arrests, race riots, and lynchings. Mike Miller—a white SNCC field secretary from San Francisco’s largely Latino Mission District neighborhood who ran that city’s SNCC office—recognized that African Americans and Mexican American agricultural workers experienced identical forms of overlapping racial discrimination and economic oppression. Miller therefore saw it as only fitting that SNCC reach out to California’s exploited farmworkers.7
Miller orchestrated SNCC’s involvement with the farmworkers during a time of transition for the organization. The Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, during which SNCC recruited white northern student volunteers to conduct voter registration among African