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Cesar Chavez Day
Today, March 31st is Cesar Chavez Day here in California (and seven other states), a day set aside to honor the civil rights leader. The Cesar Chavez Foundation explains:
This Chavez holiday season also marks the historic 40th anniversary of Cesar’s first long public fast, of 25 days, to rededicate the Farm Worker Movement to nonviolence. During hungry winter of 1968, the Delano grape strikers were in the third year of their walkouts. There was little hope. The grape growers were often abusive and sometimes violent. With some young male strikers talking about resorting to violence, Cesar stopped eating. Even though his health was in danger, he refused to take food until all the farm workers promised to follow the path of nonviolence instead of violence.The fast succeeded. All talk of violence ceased. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote Cesar, expressing admiration and solidarity. Thousands of farm workers and supporters attended a Catholic mass to end the fast, including Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, who described Cesar as “one of the heroic figures of our time.” For Cesar, strikes, boycotts, marches, political campaigns and other activities were not only weapons against opponents, but also his way of involving masses of people in their own struggle to avoid “the senseless violence that brings no honor to any class or community.” He saw nonviolence in action and was convinced all people—especially the poor—have a duty to exercise freedom and to take part in the democratic process.
For more:
— Cesar Chavez Foundation
— Cesar Chavez Foundation: Cesar Chavez Day page
— UCLA’s Chicana/o Latina/o net page on Cesar Chavez
— America’s Library: Cesar Chavez page
— Las Culturas’s Cesar Chavez book
— Wikipedia’s Cesar Chavez page
— Wikipedia’s Cesar Chavez Day page
— michael | March 31, 2008 02:44 PM | I found it online
