Ganz saw firsthand the pressure being put on California delegates not to support the Mississippi Freedom Democrats—all the typical moves like threatening to deny judicial appointments or to withdraw administration support for locally favored legislation. He was not at the various high-level meetings where Hubert Humphrey, Walter Mondale, and Reuther tried to force an unwanted compromise on SNCC and other civil rights leaders, or at the final, phony negotiations that tied up the MFDP leadership while party operatives maneuvered an unannounced voice vote by the credentials committee on the very question supposedly being negotiated. But he heard all about it in wrenching detail afterward. SNCC leaders were sure they had been the victims of a typical backroom ruse executed by the very people who had encouraged them to come to Atlantic City in the first place.
Ganz, like most of the SNCC organizers and those sympathetic to them around the country, was furious. He stood vigil with others from SNCC across the street from the convention center on the Boardwalk, amid a replica of Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney’s burned-out car, a bell from a bombed Mississippi church, and huge photographs of the three martyrs. He was there when Johnson came out on the balcony after his nomination and received the applause of the Atlantic City crowd, many of them deep into the drunken revelry of postconvention celebration. Huddled around the destroyed car, the SNCC vigilers had a good view of the triumphant president. Marshall hated him. August 1964: emotionally and politically as well as chronologically, the early sixties were just about over.
After the convention, Ganz traveled to the West Coast to visit his family and his friend Mike Miller, whom he had met through SNCC. Miller suggested that while in Bakersfield, Ganz might try to organize a local Friends of SNCC chapter, so Ganz called Brother Gilbert, with whom he had become acquainted as a youth. Brother Gilbert—now the vice principal and dean of discipline at Bakersfield’s Catholic high school, Garces Memorial—was interested in SNCC. He agreed to hold a meeting at the high school, where Ganz showed a movie about SNCC, gave a speech, and answered questions. It was quite an event. A group of Catholic grape growers in the audience denounced Brother Gilbert for holding such a radical get-together at the Catholic high school. They didn’t break up the gathering, but they were rambunctious and threatened further action. Their performance had a double, almost contradictory edge: while assured of their own power to control what should happen in their church, school, and community, they felt nervous enough about the times to make a fuss about a small meeting. Their uneasiness, not their confidence, turned out to be prophetic. It was just ten months before the Delano grape strike.
Back in Mississippi a few months later, Ganz worked with E. W. Steptoe in Amite County, the most dangerous area of the state. Although publicly committed to nonviolence, Ganz, like many other civil rights activists at the time, kept a gun in his truck. He accepted what he called the “ambiguity” of the situation. SNCC did everything it could to keep the struggle nonviolent; at the same time Marshall did not intend to be murdered on a lonely Mississippi road if a gun could prevent it. Together with Steptoe, Ganz was organizing leadership groups, Freedom Schools, and community centers, but SNCC was falling apart. Overwhelmed by the enormity of the their sacrifices (scores killed since 1960, thousands badly beaten), many SNCC organizers lost their faith in the power of nonviolence. Others doubted the ultimate effectiveness of long-term community organizing. Most smoldered with contempt for the white liberals who had betrayed them at the Atlantic City convention, and many grew suspicious of the whites in their own ranks. The most respected SNCC leaders fell ill. Executive Secretary James Foreman had an abscessed arm and ulcer. A friend said of Chairman John Lewis, “He resembled a corpse . . . so great was his exhaustion.” The psychiatrist Robert Coles reported that many of the young organizers were “clinically depressed.” New divisions appeared: Northern and Caribbean sophisticates versus rustic southerners; organizers versus floaters; men versus women. Staff meetings were filled with recriminations and went on through the night without reaching any conclusions. Perhaps worst of all, Bob Moses became more and more quiet, skipped meetings, and eventually lapsed into complete silence.3
Ganz was there for most of it. He was there at the meeting when Moses announced, “You can have Bob Moses; I am now Robert Paris,” and passed out bread and wine as some sort of final benediction. “Has he gone crazy?” Ganz wondered. And what should he himself do? While working with Steptoe, Marshall had received a copy of The Movement, which had a front-page picture of the NFWA-sponsored march in support of the Linnell rent strike. There in the front row, with his black robes, was Brother Gilbert. Ganz returned to San Francisco to talk over the situation with Mike Miller. The grape strike had just begun, and Miller encouraged him to remain in SNCC but to see if he could get a job organizing for the NFWA. By this time Brother Gilbert had quit his job at Garces Memorial and gone to work for Cesar Chavez. He was preparing to leave the priesthood if his order didn’t like it, and was already going by his given name, LeRoy Chatfield. As it happened, Chavez was scheduled to speak about the strike a couple of days after Ganz arrived in Bakersfield.
“I introduced myself and [Chavez] said, ‘Oh, yeah, yeah, LeRoy’s told me about you.’ I was very cautious because at that point in the civil rights movement there was a lot of polarization developing between blacks and whites, and it was sort of like, there’s no role for whites in the movement . . . and so I was very cautious and sort of like, well, you know, I said . . . ‘If you want support or help or something like that’ . . . but he said, ‘Oh no, no. You should come, come to Delano.’ ”4
Cesar quickly arranged for Marshall to drive him to the Bay Area for another speaking tour, and they had plenty of time alone in the car to check each other out. Ganz was immediately surprised that Chavez didn’t hold his whiteness against him. Although they talked about organizing, what really seemed to spark Cesar’s interest were Marshall’s ideas about religion. It turned out that Chavez had met Ganz’s father, and wanted to hear about Jewish belief, tradition, and custom. It was the first of what would be a long series of religious conversations. Ganz always thought that the reason he got so close to Cesar so quickly was that Chavez was more comfortable with religious people than political people, and he could see a little of both in Ganz. By the time they returned to Delano, they were sold on each other. Ganz would set up a new NFWA office in Bakersfield. It would be a backup, just in case the strike turned out to be a complete defeat. And for the time being, Ganz could still receive his symbolically important $10 a week stipend as a SNCC field secretary.
On a slim budget that was carefully monitored by Chavez, and using money he raised from Bakersfield’s small liberal community, Ganz rented an office with a room in the back where he could live, bought an old car, and began his work in a barrio still called Little Okie, now filled with people who had come from Mexico in the 1940s or whose parents had come in the 1920s. He did some agitation against scab herders who were operating in Little Okie, but his main task was to set up a Service Center where he helped people with welfare, disability, and income tax problems. A student from Bakersfield Junior College, Jessica Govea, started coming by to help run the office. Her parents had been CSO activists and she had known Cesar Chavez since her early childhood. Jessica had been a semiregular on the early grape strike picket lines and a volunteer in Delano. In the Bakersfield office and back room she taught Marshall Spanish. They fell in love over flash cards.
Soon after he began his work in Bakersfield, Ganz was called to Delano. Walter Reuther, president of the powerful United Automobile Workers, was coming to town, and since Reuther was one of the first national figures to endorse the grape strike, Chavez wanted all hands in Delano to help mobilize the turnout. At the time it bothered Ganz only slightly that Reuther had been the staff sergeant most responsible