Rudy Reyes and company, spurred on by the majority of the men on the docks who were sympathetic to the cause, did what they could to interfere with the loading. The grapes came from Delano on pallets and were unloaded with pallet jacks, hand-operated, heavy metal forks on wheels. Rudy and a few others, picket signs in hand, would get on the docks and do what they could to get in the way of the jacks and prevent the grapes from being unloaded. The swampers were furious and tried to hit the picketers’ ankles with the forks of the jacks. One time Gilbert Padilla was knocked off the loading dock, badly twisted his ankle, and spent a couple of weeks on crutches. Only the support of the other dockworkers for the pickets prevented an all-out bloody battle. Dock supervisors started to call in the police, but by the time they arrived the folks from Delano were just peacefully parading back and forth. Nevertheless, some of the picketers were arrested, and the relations with the police deteriorated. Reyes began to dread the early-morning confrontations:
One of those forks could do some damage. One time when I was trying to get out of the way, I accidentally-on-purpose leaned into the grape boxes and made the swamper spill his load. He was really mad, and tried to corner me for a fight. I was about half his size, nimble and quick, and got away. That night when we got back to the apartment we really laughed about it. But I was laughing because I was so nervous and scared. I remember my back hurt, and I thought, well, that must be why they say you have a streak of yellow down your back, it was my yellow streak that was hurting. I could even feel it. And, as usual, the cops just made things worse. They came and tried to shove us off the docks. And they arrested us, too. Usually we got bailed out pretty quick because there were so many friendly lawyers in LA. Sometimes we had to stay in jail overnight. It was not too bad to be in jail for a while. It was not as bad as having those pallet jacks come at you. I had nightmares about those metal forks.17
Eventually, the drama on the docks seemed not only too dangerous but a silly waste of time. It had degenerated into a kind of turf war. One morning Rudy was sitting with a few others at a table in the coffee shop across from the terminal where the pickets and the produce workers sometimes waited for the trucks to arrive. Beside him was a college student who had come to Delano during the first days of the strike and stayed. She was an attractive young woman, and she had had to endure a string of vulgar insults from the strikers’ opponents on the docks. A Los Angeles policeman had called her a whore. On this particular morning one of the enemy swampers had come by the table, put his hand on her shoulder, and suggested she come service him. Rudy Reyes couldn’t let that pass. He picked up one of those old fashioned sugar bowls with a heavy bottom and delivered several quick, sharp blows to the offender’s head. Blood and sugar were flying everywhere. The man slunk away, and some of the other swampers came by and told Rudy he had done the right thing. Maybe so, but the attempt to stop the grapes on the docks was now clearly the wrong thing. The NFWA would have to come up with some other tactics.
After the unexpected, dramatic success on the San Francisco docks, Chavez authorized Jim Drake to try to organize some kind of formal grape boycott. Drake had no budget, no phone of his own, no office. Cesar regularly talked to him about various boycott plans, but made no great commitment to the project—he was more concerned with other matters: figuring out how to force the governor to put pressure on the growers to negotiate; maintaining the morale of the members and volunteers; trying to set up organizing projects in different farm worker areas. Drake was on his own. To concentrate on his task, he had to find a separate place to work. During the strike, the NFWA had rented an abandoned labor camp a few miles outside of Delano. In serious disrepair, mosquito-infested, the camp seemed to sink deeper into the mud after every winter rain. But this didn’t dampen the energy of some volunteers, whose hopes remained high. On the wall near the entrance someone had painted three names in large letters: Zapata, Villa, Chavez. Two old toilets with indoor plumbing stood on the grounds but separated from the rest of the buildings. Chavez designated the women’s toilet as the first boycott office; the men’s toilet would henceforth be genderless.
Drake had found his office space. He was delighted to be set loose on his pet project, and in good humor he hung Air Wicks in his new windowless outpost. It still stank. Drake got Richard Chavez to bolt a board on top of the old toilet bowl, and to build a regular desk next to it. He had a phone line installed. From Hartmire he got a list of progressive Protestants as potential supporters of a boycott. A new NFWA volunteer, Brother Gilbert, helped him put together a list of possible Catholic supporters. He called Mike Miller of Bay Area Friends of SNCC and got the names and numbers of student and civil rights activists. The last group was the most promising. In San Francisco in early October, SNCC, CORE, and Citizens for Farm Labor had started acting on their own even before the longshoremen had refused to touch the grapes, and 100 people had picketed the San Francisco office of the Schenley Corporation, demanding that it settle with its striking grape workers. When the office workers first saw the picket line outside, they figured the people were demanding the hiring of black office workers. The picketers returned every Friday afternoon. If such picket lines could be maintained in other areas, wouldn’t that be the beginning of a national boycott?18
Drake asked Miller to be cochair of whatever they all decided the boycott effort might turn out to be. At twenty-seven, Mike Miller was already a political veteran. As a Berkeley undergraduate in the late 1950s, he had founded Slate, a precursor of the later New Left campus organizations. In 1960 he met Saul Alinsky, and through Alinsky he met Fred Ross, who sparked his interest in the Central Valley, kept him informed of the progress of the CSO, and introduced him to Cesar Chavez. In 1961, deeply inspired by the first southern sit-ins, Miller started working with SNCC, quickly joined the staff, and helped build the Bay Area Friends of SNCC, an organization designed to raise money for SNCC’s southern voter registration campaigns. Eager to get closer to the battlefield, he went to work with Bob Moses in Greenwood, Mississippi in 1963, and returned home only after a serious late-night automobile accident on a deserted Mississippi road. He remained a SNCC field secretary working in the Bay Area and helped select the West Coast students who participated in Mississippi Summer. He envisioned SNCC as a group of full-time professional organizers who would work in various communities throughout the country, not just with African Americans in the South. In 1964 he helped start an organizing project to fight urban renewal in the Fillmore District, one of San Francisco’s main black neighborhoods, and the initial success of that project plus his longtime honorable service in SNCC made him one of the most influential young white activists in the country. It was that influence that Drake and Chavez needed. Several other SNCC field secretaries were already active in California, and Miller, with his quiet, unassuming, but authoritative voice, offered direction and advice to all of them. Now the NFWA was asking SNCC to cosponsor a national table grape boycott and offering Mike Miller the position of co-chairman. He did not hesitate to accept.19
Drake, Miller, and Chavez quickly agreed on a few essentials. They would focus on Schenley and DiGiorgio. Those were the two big Delano-area corporations that produced not only table grapes but also various other brand-name products that would be easy to identify and boycott. Since the Christmas season was near, initially they would go after Schenley, as the company produced or marketed several popular wines and liquors, including Cutty Sark, Ancient Age, and I.W. Harper. They agreed that the boycott could be put into motion quickly in the nation’s major cities by various Friends of SNCC groups, CORE chapters, and the rapidly multiplying New Left student organizations. Those folks had already been doing support work for black civil rights initiatives and could easily transfer some of their energy and experience into support for Mexican American farm workers. As an extra bonus, the boycott cities would be an excellent place to send many of the white volunteers who had staffed the farm worker picket lines but were now just hanging around Delano without much to do.
Many questions remained. Drake and Miller, both deeply interested in organizational matters, talked over the possibilities. In the long run, what would the various boycott organizations look like? Would they continue to be run by the already established left and civil rights groups? Would they be new coalitions put together by those groups? Who would be part of that coalition? Religious organizations certainly, but labor unions, too? What formal relationship would the boycott organizations have to the NFWA and SNCC? What about duplicating the experience in Los Angeles, where NFWA leaders—first Dolores Huerta and then Gilbert