The work of boycott volunteers in cities also paid dividends in shoring up political support for the Migrant Ministry among Protestants at a time when it drew fire for supporting the UFW. Although Chavez drew on Catholic symbols and rituals to appeal to a mostly Catholic workforce, it was Hartmire and Drake, Protestant ministers, who were the first religious leaders to get behind the movement. When members of the rural denominations discovered that their donations had been funding the Migrant Ministry’s activism, many of them passed a resolution demanding that the Ecumenical Ministry of the Protestant Churches terminate Hartmire’s budget. The conflict initiated a “two-year war” among Protestant churches in California as to the fate of the organization. “The rural churches wanted us gone, out, or dead,” Hartmire remembered. “Fortunately for us, the urban churches’ membership outnumbered the rural membership.” The boycott played a significant role in educating urban Protestants about the stakes of the farm workers’ struggle and convinced many urban congregants to encourage their ministers to fight for the preservation of the Migrant Ministry. The moral dimensions of the battle also persuaded many urban Protestants to contribute time and money to the boycott.47
As the examples of New York City, Los Angeles, Portland, and Toronto illustrate, boycott strategies varied from city to city, but overall the boycott seemed to be working. By mid-1968, under the auspices of Jerry and Juanita Brown, the UFW began to chart the progress of boycott houses by the changes in the quantity of car lot shipments to major North American cities. In New York City, for example, shippers delivered 801 fewer car lots than they had in 1967; in Chicago and Boston, the totals were down by 360 and 327, respectively. Although these numbers signaled success and overall shipments declined by 2,254 car lots in North America, the Browns also noticed increases in nontraditional cities: Miami was up 57 car lots; Atlanta up 16; Houston 36; Denver 12, Kansas City 11; Fort Worth 7. These numbers revealed the growers’ strategy of circumventing the boycott by marketing their table grapes to new markets, particularly in the South, West, and Midwest. In addition, although the UFW had established a presence in Canada, 1968 market reports suggested that shippers had redirected a number of car lots north of the border: Montreal was up 57 car lots, whereas Toronto climbed by 44.48 These were the trends that compelled Brown to challenge the union leadership to make a decision: either continue to treat the boycott as a supplement to the strike or place greater emphasis on it by embracing an approach that gave them a greater chance for victory.
COMMITMENT DAY
By midsummer of 1968, the struggle had turned nasty, with threats against Chavez’s life and palpable anxiety among civil rights activists everywhere. In April, Martin Luther King Jr., an important ally of the movement, had been assassinated in Memphis, precipitating a rash of violent reactions in urban centers throughout the United States. Growing tension in the country mirrored that of the city, as picketers on the front lines of the grape strike experienced physical attacks, first by Teamster affiliates and then by law enforcement officials, who employed rough tactics in dispersing union demonstrations. Chavez, who had observed the effectiveness of King’s peaceful protests and read Gandhi’s philosophy on nonviolence, suppressed movement advocates’ appetite for retaliation by practicing long fasts that took a toll on his mind and body. The physical challenge of the fasts further weakened his aching back, making travel of any sort painful. Jerry and Juanita Brown, who owned a Westphalia Volkswagen van with a fold-down bed, provided Chavez with a vehicle ideal for traveling up and down California. Accompanied by Chavez’s two German shepherds, Huelga and Boycott, he, Jerry, and Juanita made the trek up California Highway 1, followed by an entourage of farm workers trained to provide security. “There’d be security cars in front of us, and one in back of us,” recalled Jerry Brown, “all connected by walkie-talkies.”
FIGURE 7. Jerry Brown (front right) on a grape strike picket line, Delano, California, ca. 1968.
As they entered Santa Barbara, Chavez ordered a quick diversion to the California mission to reflect on the battles ahead and pray for the success of the retreat. From the beginning, Chavez regarded the Catholic Church as an important influence on the movement and derived great personal inspiration from the example of Christ and His sacrifice. During the Giumarra campaign, the association grew stronger as the U.S. Council of Bishops moved from a position of neutrality to being an advocate for the farm workers. Although some local priests in the San Joaquin and Coachella Valleys remained partial to the growers, a number of Catholic and Protestant clergy willingly sacrificed time and occasionally their bodies for the movement.49 Chavez’s hour-long visit to the mission refreshed the embattled leader and gave him time to think about the message he would deliver to movement participants later that day.
Jerry Brown chose a much more secular form of preparation for the retreat. Brown believed Chavez’s initial apathy for the data he had collected was a consequence of his poor style of presentation. Brown recalled, “I was very intense, very fast-talking, [and] very impatient.… I did the most horrible job one could imagine.” Brown turned to the experienced LeRoy Chatfield for guidance. Chatfield understood what inspired the rank and file, and he embodied the calm but deliberate approach Chavez valued. Together, the two men shared their vision of the boycott’s future with the entire membership, while Chavez watched intently at the back of the room.
Brown and Chatfield argued for a much more systematic approach to the campaign, taking into consideration the data collected by Brown and drawing on the experience of leaders in some of the most effective boycott cities to date. First, the two argued for an approach that concentrated on building strong boycott houses in ten of the top forty-one cities where more than 50 percent of California table grapes were sold. Those cities were New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Boston, Toronto, Detroit, Montreal, and Cleveland. They replaced the anecdotal reports for judging the success of the boycott with a clear and measurable goal of reducing shipments in every city by 10 percent or more over 1966 totals.50 Although growers had begun to show signs of redirecting shipments elsewhere to soften the blow of the boycott, Brown and Chatfield calculated that such a shift could not make up for the substantial losses in growers’ traditional markets. As growers sent grapes to other ports, Jerry and Juanita would respond by working with volunteers in those cities to open up new boycott houses.
Second, Brown and Chatfield provided an analysis of Huerta’s successful campaign in New York City and proposed that every leader strive to implement a similar strategy in his or her city. The brilliance of Huerta’s strategy, Brown concluded, was her insistence on changing the marketing habits of the entire A&P chain rather than settling for victory at individual A&P stores, one at a time. According to Brown, Huerta had built strong boycott committees in neighborhoods where union membership was high and volunteers were plentiful, enthusiastic, and committed to stopping the sale of grapes in their neighborhood. “Once [these individual A&P markets] started to capitulate,” Brown told the retreat participants, “[Huerta] wouldn’t call off the picket lines until they agreed to take [grapes] off the entire division [of A&P markets].” Brown explained the logic of what he called the “tactic of the hostage stores” by way of his own research on supermarket chains across North America:
[I