Our visual archiving work has always been supplemented by oral histories that provide support to our photographic collections. This month, we present you with two powerful examples of the oral history work at the Bradley Center. We introduce the Black Power Oral History Project with three video clips. The oral history transcriptions and video recordings are now available at the University Library’s Special Collections reading room. We also show you four videos of our two-part oral history interview with Eliseo Medina for our Farmworker Movement Collection. We invite you to visit our @CSUNBradleyCenter channel and explore our growing collection of videos. Also, the exhibition Unsung Heroes: Somos L.A. at the Henry P. Rio Bridge Gallery at L.A. City Hall during Latino Heritage Month featured photographs by Emmon Clarke and John Kouns accompanying images by three emerging Latinx photographers.
Black Power Oral History
By Keith Rice
Since 2015, the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center’s Drs. Karin Stanford and Keith Rice have been conducting oral history interviews with members of the Black Power Movement in Southern California. The Bradley Center is proud to announce that as of October 2023, transcripts and video recordings in the Black Power Oral History Project will be available for access in the University Library’s Special Collections reading room.
The physical and philosophical resistance to violent white supremacy during the 1960s and 1970s known as the Black Power Movement is one of the most important movements to occur in Southern California. Its role in the larger Black Power Movement is often overlooked, underrepresented, and underexposed in scholarship and popular culture. The young people who started their revolutionary journeys during that time were in the springtime of their lives. Now in the autumn of their lives, members of the Black Power Movement in Southern California have chosen to share memories of their lives before, during, and after the activism in the 1960s with the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center.
The Black Power Oral History Project interviews reveal that the Black Power Movement was a serious and often times deadly undertaking. It was much more than public posturing in leather jackets, berets, and chants of “Off the Pig.” It was a war over the right to exist as Black American citizens with all the rights and privileges that go with it. These interviews reveal the common philosophies, sometimes conflicting ideologies, and the camaraderie that existed between some of the leading organizations within the Black freedom struggle in Southern California.
Some of the organizations discussed in these interviews include Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the Nation of Islam, US Organization, the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the Black Panther Political Party, Che Lumumba Club, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Community Alert Patrol (CAP) and the Black Student Alliance (BSA). Members of these organizations chose to rebel against the discriminatory and immoral practices of local and federal law enforcement agencies that used legal, extralegal, and violent tactics against their citizens in order to disrupt and dismantle the Black Power Movement and prevent the rise of a Black Messiah.
Black Power Oral History finding aid.
Black Power Says Huelga!
By Marta Valier
The story of the alliance between the Farmworker Movement and the Black Panther Party (BPP) is usually told as if it started in 1968 with the grape boycott. Emmon Clarke’s series of photographs taken in late 1966 shows that the Black Power movement picketed for farmworkers at this time—the BPP was established in October of 1966. The United Farm Worker Organizing Committee (UFWOC) launched in 1968 a nationwide boycott of all California table grapes, and the Panthers joined the farm workers' striking efforts by banning the consumption of Bitter Dog, the official drink of the BBP. This UFWOC-BPP alliance got stronger in 1969 when the union launched a boycott against Safeway, the second-largest buyer of California grapes in the U.S., and the Panthers joined it. Not only was Safeway buying its grapes from growers refusing to sign collective contracts with UFW, but it also refused to donate to the Panthers’ Free Breakfast for Children Program, a program that provided meals to school-age children and that depended on donations from local businesses. The UFWOC-BPP boycott forced Safeway on 27th and West streets in Oakland to close. The alliance between the two movements was not only local but also the BPP network helped the UFWOC nationwide. Gilbert Padilla remembers how the Black Panthers helped in Los Angeles and Philadelphia, and Eliseo Medina worked with the Panthers in Chicago. The support was reciprocal. When the Panthers were targeted by the FBI, the UFWOC rallied in defense of the party. And in 1973, while César Chávez was endorsing the Oakland mayoral campaign of Bobby Seale, the Panthers were marching with farm workers on the picket lines of a new UFW Safeway boycott.
FMC Oral History: Eliseo Medina
By José Luis Benavides
From 1995 to 2005, Dr. Kent Kirkton, Dr. Jorge García, Robert G. Marshall, Dr. Judith Marti, Manley Witten, and other members of the campus community conducted dozens of interviews for the California Farm Worker Oral History Project. Last year, we were lucky to re-start their work doing a couple of oral history interviews with Eliseo Medina, who devoted thirteen years of his life to building, paraphrasing the tile of journalist Miriam Pawel’s powerful book, the union of his dreams. In 1965, Medina, a 19-year-old farmworker, joined the National Farm Workers Association during the grape strike and the following year he learned how a union election is organized and won under the supervision of Fred Ross. He led the boycotting efforts in Chicago for several years organizing rallies, fundraisers, enlisting churches, student and women’s groups, churches, and other civic organizations. In Florida, he successfully organized a lobbying effort against an agribusiness bill to ban union hiring halls and preserving the crew leader system. In 1973, he was elected to the UFW Board of Directors and defended the right of unions to bargain collectively against the growers’ effort to evade policies of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act (ALRA).
Eliseo Medina tells the story of his participation in the farmworker movement as a striker, volunteer, and organizer of the National Farm Workers Association and later of the United Farm Workers. (2:19:00)
Under the headline "Slavery Ain't Dead," an April 6, 1973 story in the farmworker newspaper "El Malcriado" reported from Homestead, Florida: "With the state still feeling the effects of the typhoid epidemic that hit farm workers here recently, another farm labor scandal has hit Dade County—this time the virtual slavery of farm workers by 'crew leaders,' the Florida counterpart to the California labor contractor." Eliseo Medina recounts these events in this segment of the second oral history interview. (5:11)
Eliseo Medina recalls the UFW strategies against La Migra in Oxnard to prevent the growers from using the Border Patrol as an anti-union force. (5:10)
Eliseo Medina talks about the complex legacy of the Farmworker Movement in this final segment of the second oral history interview. (5:53)
Unsung Heroes: Somos L.A.
We send a big thank you to Addy González, co-founder of 11:11 Projects, for the use of photographs by Emmon Clarke and John Kouns in the exhibition Unsung Heroes: Somos L.A. at the Henry P. Rio Bridge Gallery at L.A. City Hall. The exhibition was part of the celebration of Latino Heritage Month and was dedicated to our everyday heroes, including farmworkers. The exhibition showed the Center’s archival images with photographs captured by three talented Latinx photographers—David Andrade, Lilith Carolina Ferreira, and Castro Frank. Bradley Center’s Marta Valier and Joseph Silva went to see the exhibition with Addy and these three emerging photographers.