By Gillian Morán-Pérez
As we enter June, we must identify one of the most important days in early African American history that earmarked the path to freedom. The Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 would decree slaves as free people, but this liberty was not tangible to all slaves within Confederate states. Not until June 19, 1863, when about 2,000 Union troops marched over to Galveston Bay, Texas, and announced that more than 250,000 enslaved Black people were deemed free as executed by the decree. From that day forward, June 19th became Juneteenth which, in the words of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, “...marks our country’s second independence day…The historical legacy of Juneteenth shows the value of never giving up hope in uncertain times.”
While Juneteenth symbolizes the end of enslavement, much of our nation’s past and present continues to take freedom away from Black people—the road to complete, undisturbed freedom is not yet over. We at the center want to commemorate Juneteenth by taking a look back at Sunday, May 26, 1963, when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. came to Wrigley Field, Los Angeles to lead a Freedom Rally. King had come to unify Black Americans to support the movement in Birmingham.
According to the Los Angeles Sentinel, Dr. King told the 50,000 people in the stadium: “You can help us in Birmingham by getting rid of any segregation and discrimination—such as the facto segregation—which exists right here in Los Angeles”. The rally received, the Sentinel reported, around $75,000 to help the 3,200 demonstrators arrested earlier that month. On May 2nd, 1963, the Children’s Crusade took place when students ditched class and marched out of the 16th Street Baptist Church, singing freedom songs - over 1,000 children were arrested that day and placed in Birmingham Jail, the same place where King famously penned his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” a call for people to act on their moral responsibility to fight injustice and to take action.
Los Angeles Times published the story of the Freedom Rally with only one photo of a man arrested by the police for disturbing the peace. The Black press would run many photos of the festive event, considered the largest civil rights rally in Los Angeles. While the Times editorial was titled, “Reason—Not Intimidation,” the Los Angeles Sentinel titled its editorial: “Kingly Tribute.” You can find more photos of the freedom rally here.
The criminalization of journalism in El Salvador
By Marta Valier
In this episode of our podcast, Emancipated, Ángela Aurora, a Salvadoran journalism professor and visiting scholar at the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center, interviews Julia Gavarrete, a Salvadoran journalist working for the digital newspaper El Faro. They discuss, in Spanish, the growing criminalization of journalism in El Salvador, the use of spyware to monitor journalists' phones and computers, and attacks on human and civic rights. In the last eight weeks, authorities claim to have made over 31,000 arrests. Aurora and Gavarrete explain how this lack of accountability and unchecked executive power is having particularly grim consequences for those living in the most impoverished communities.
You can take a look at the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center’s photos on El Salvador by Richard Cross here and you can listen to two short segments of the Center’s oral history interview with Óscar Martínez, one of the founders of El Faro on our YouTube channel. One segment is about his experience covering politics for La Prensa Gráfica and why he abandoned the newspaper, and in the second segment, he explains how the Zetas operate in Mexico.
Farmworker Movement Spotlight: Kathy Lynch
By Marta Valier
In the early 1960s, Kathy Lynch, a sociology student at Berkeley, got involved with Newman Hall, a Catholic student center, and met the French Catholic Worker priest Fr. Jacques Valentin who encouraged her to study in France, where she was exposed to anti-colonial activism in support of a free Algeria. Back at Berkeley, she met a group of students, the Amigos Anonymous, who traveled to rural communities in Mexico and worked building schools and libraries. Some of them were associated with Friends of SNCC and in June of 1964, she joined their efforts to register voters in rural areas in Holly Springs, Mississippi.
When the Delano grape strike began in September of 1965, Kathy Lynch was a work-study student with Citizens for Farm Labor (CFL), a group focused on creating a network of support and advocacy on behalf of farmworkers. She joined the farmworkers’ efforts and organized Bay Area food caravans. She took food, clothes, and money raised on campus to Delano. During these early trips to Delano, she used to stay overnight at the Pink House behind the NFWA office. She started picketing with Dolores Huerta, getting up very early in the morning and heading to the fields to talk to strikebreakers, urging them to join the strike. Her routine became collecting food, clothes, and money during the week and on weekends, traveling to Delano.
When César Chávez went to the Bay Area in November of 1965 for a speaking tour, Kathy Lynch was the person organizing the rally at Sprout Hall at Berkeley, during which over $6,000 in donations for the strike were collected. From this point on, her involvement with the farmworker movement kept growing. In January of 1966, she moved to Delano to work for Jim Drake. She was quickly put in charge to draft a report of the Friday night strike meetings, as she was able to understand Spanish, and was responsible for distributing the $5 weekly stipends to the NFWA volunteers. Lynch played a major role in coordinating the successful San Francisco Bay Area boycott. In 1969, she returned to Delano to spend more time with her five children. Between 1969 and 1983, the year she left the union, Lynch took on different roles and projects, from directing the boycott information center to forming a co-op daycare center, and serving as a director of the health clinic. Together with her husband, Lupe Murgía, and their five children, their family was one of the first to move to Stoneybrook Retreat, a previously tuberculosis sanatorium east of Bakersfield purchased by the National Farm Worker Service Center that later became known as La Paz, when it became the headquarters for the union in 1973.
Farmworker Movement Spotlight: Fred Ross
Yesterday, June 9, was the 70th anniversary of the 1952 meeting of Fred Ross with César Chávez and other workers on an apricot farm. Ross wanted to recruit Chávez as a potential organizer, but Chávez was skeptical of Ross. In the magazine Ramparts, Chávez recounts how he thought Ross "was just another social worker doing a study. We were going to teach the gringo a little bit of how we felt,” wrote Chávez. He was going to give a signal to his co-workers to give Ross a lesson. “But he started talking,” Chávez recalled, “and the more he talked, the more wide-eyed I became and less inclined I was to give the signal.” Chávez finished joining Ross’s Community Service Organization, where he developed and master his skills as an organizer for a decade before creating the Farm Workers Association in 1962.
Farmworkers working DiGiorgio in Delano and in Borrego Springs had already voted earlier in August, but for months the company did not allow farmworkers working at the 9,000-acre farm in Arvin to have elections. Only after a sit-in and a picket in front of DiGiorgio’s office in San Francisco, pressure from Governor Pat Brown, and the looming threat of a boycott, did DiGiorgio agree to elections at their biggest California property. Fifty-nine percent of voters choose to join the UFW.
Chávez put Fred Ross in charge of the entire campaign at DiGiorgio to get out the vote. Ross prepared a three-by-five card for every eligible voter. He assigned each organizer a certain number of cards. He made the organizers responsible to a team of coordinators, and the coordinators responsible to him.
Deported Veterans exhibition update
On Tuesday, June 7, 2022, repatriated veterans met with Secretary of Homeland security, Alejandro Mayorkas, as part of the Immigrant Military Members and Veterans Initiative, a collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security and the Veterans Administration at the Museum of Social Justice. The Secretary and veterans first met privately and later joined community partners, advocates, and family members to view our exhibition: “Deported Veterans: Photographs by Joseph Silva." Here is a report by Telemundo 52 in Los Angeles (in Spanish). Congratulations to our archival researcher Joseph Silva.