A TRAILBLAZING ORGANIZERS' ORGANIZER

A TRAILBLAZING ORGANIZERS' ORGANIZER
By Dick Meister

For more than a half-century Fred Ross was among the most influential,
skilled, dedicated and successful of the community organizers who have done
so much for the underdogs of American society.

Yet most people probably have never heard of Ross, a tall, gray, lean man,
a quiet but fiercely committed man who died 15 years ago, in September of
1992, at age 82.

That, however, is exactly how Fred Ross wanted it. He saw his job as
training others to assume leadership and the public recognition that
accompanies it. And train them he did, hundreds of them, including farm
worker leader Cesar Chavez.

Chavez was a typical Ross trainee – a poor, inexperienced member of an
oppressed minority who was inspired to mobilize others like him to stand up
to their oppressors.

“Fred did such a good job of explaining how poor people could build power I
could taste it,” Chavez recalled.

Chavez was among the Mexican Americans living in California’s barrios in
the 1950s that Ross, then with Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation,
was helping form political blocs to demand improvements in the woefully
inadequate community services provided them,

Ross’ approach was, as always, to get people to organize themselves, and he
sensed correctly that young Chavez was “potentially the best grass-roots
leader I’d ever run into.”

Within just a few years, the small organizations formed by the residents of
particular barrios joined into a potent statewide group, the Community
Services Organization, headed by Chavez.

A few years later, Chavez founded what became the United Farm Workers union.
It was the country’s first effective organization of farmworkers precisely
because it was built in accord with Ross’ principles – from the ground up by
Chavez and other farmworkers relying heavily on such non-violent tactics as
the boycott.

Ross had started out to be a classroom teacher after working his way through
the University of Southern California in 1936. But he could find no teaching
jobs in that dark year of the Great Depression. He took other public work,
eventually managing the federal migratory labor camp near Bakersfield,
California, that novelist John Steinbeck used as the model for the camp that
had a central role in “The Grapes of Wrath.”

Fiction though it was, Steinbeck’s account was accurate. Conditions in the
camp were deplorable. So were the conditions imposed on the migrants by the
local growers for whom they worked.

But the migrants organized themselves to win better living and working
conditions, thanks to young Fred Ross. He went from cabin to cabin and tent
to tent “every morning after daybreak,” encouraging camp residents to form
the organizations that helped improve their conditions.

Ross had found his life’s work. He would become a full-time organizer, a
task he described as being “a social arsonist who goes around setting people
on fire,” Never was Ross paid more than a marginal salary, sometimes no more
than room, board and expenses, but never would he falter.

His goal was “to help people do away with fear – fear to speak up and demand
their rights … to push the people to get out in front so they could prove
to themselves they could do it.”

Ross left the migrant camp to work with the Japanese Americans on the West
Coast who were herded into internment camps during World War II. Ross, then
with the American Friends Service Committee, helped internees win release by
finding them jobs in the manpower-short steel plants and other factories in
the Midwest that produced vital war materials.

After the war, he returned to southern California to help African Americans
and Mexican Americans fight against housing and school segregation. They
fought effectively, too, against police brutality and elected Los Angeles’
first Hispanic City Councilman.

Ross also worked in Arizona, helping Yaqui Indians get sewers, paved
streets, medical facilities and other basic needs that had been denied their
communities.

Ross’ most ambitious and probably most satisfying work came during his 15
years of training hundreds of organizers and negotiators for the United
Farm Workers from the UFW’s inexperienced and long oppressed rank-and-file
members.

Ross kept at it for virtually the rest of his life – organizing grass-roots
campaigns for liberal politicians, joining his son Fred Jr., a highly
regarded organizer himself, in the national campaigns against U.S. policies
in Central America, and working with anti-nuclear and peace groups.

It was not until just four years before his death, when Alzheimer’s Disease
struck, that he finally stopped.

Fred Ross was an organizer’s organizer, a trailblazer, a pioneer. He was –
and he remains – a vitally important model for those seeking to empower the
powerless and to truly reform, if not perfect, this imperfect society.

“Fred fought more fights and trained more organizers and planted more seeds
of righteous indignation against social injustice than anyone we’re ever
likely to see again,” noted Jerry Cohen, formerly the UFW’s general counsel.

“He was a giant,” said filmmaker, playwright and former UFW activist Luis
Valdez. “He was an uncommon common man.”

Copyright © 2007 Dick Meister

Story ID:	2857
Written by:	Dick Meister (bio, link, contact, other stories)
Story type:	Biography
Location:	SAN Francisco CA USA
Year:	1992
Person:	Fred Ross