Have you ever heard of Chris Hartmire and his relationship with Cesar Chavez's United Farm Workers movement? If not, you may have missed one of the major factors in the success of the movement.
At one point, there were an estimated 17 million people worldwide actively boycotting grapes in support of the United Farm Workers Union, and Chris Hartmire was an important part of making that happen.
It was 1965 and throngs of Filipinos and Mexican workers walked out from their jobs in the grape fields of Delano, Calif., protesting unfair wages and unjust treatment and demanding the right to unionize.
Growers tried to crush all organizing efforts, zeroing in on the United Farm Workers and its charismatic leader, Cesar Chavez, whom they tried to paint as a communist.
Into this chasm stepped the Rev. Wayne “Chris” Hartmire Jr. He was the director of the California Migrant Ministry, a longstanding program that assisted farmworkers. They were among the first religious organizations to publicly back what would become the UFW.
Chavez said, "Chris and his gang went up and down the country interpreting what we were doing in the light of the controversy that existed. And it split church committees wide open. People were taking sides. We didn’t win all of them, but we won a lot."
“He lived a life in service to the poor. He loved it [ . . . ], and he was good at it. People loved him and yet, there’s not much public credit," [LeRoy] Chatfield said.
All quotes snipped from an L.A. Times article about Hartmire
When Chris Hartmire passed away last December, we lost a great treasure of a man, but his life was just one example of a "hidden" factor within our social justice movements.
There have been lots of discussions (and arguments!) about the role of religion in our society, but one thing is often overlooked. That is, the huge role of liberal religous folks taking part in social justice movements. While right-wing religious fanatics often turn themselves into circus acts to gain media attention, religious liberals tend to just buckle down and do the work of social justice, often without your ever knowing that they're religious.
There was a saying back in the '60s, "meet them where they're at," meaning: in order to get ordinary people on your side and involve them in your cause, you have to start at the most basic, universal level. If you take into account what has shaped their views and experience, you can use elements of that to find common ground with them. (These days, among Democratic Party activists, that truth is incorporated into the concept of "deep canvassing.")
Chris Hartmire was so effective in organizing support for the UFW because he drew on some universal values shared among all human beings of good will, which are also at the core of most world religions. Those values are: caring for humanity, treating others as you would like them to treat you, taking care of the poor, being humble, and serving others. Obviously, those values can get horribly corrupted when consumed by institutional powers, but there's always pushback against that. Those values are still strong, still there to be found in the texts, still available to religious people of good will who might not have any other entrance point into understanding social issues.
One of those people was me, as a youth in the '60s and '70s. I grew up in a rural area in the midwest. My hometown had no protests, no community organizers, no social justice organizations, and very little access to information. Being a farm kid, for most of my childhood I couldn't even check out books from the public library in town, because we couldn't afford the non-resident fee for a library card. So how did I later come to be a volunteer for the United Farm Workers movement in California? It was through my church.
Rural churches are often assigned young pastors who don't yet have the seniority to manage a larger metro congregation. One of those came to our church. Before moving to our small town, he was involved in social justice and was knowledgable about the civil rights, anti-war, and women's movements. And he was very much involved with Rev. Hartmire's Migrant Ministries. Being in a relatively conservative area, he didn't push those things, but subtley brought them into discussions of moral behavior and biblical teachings.
After hearing from him about the farmworker movement, I was all in. At first it was simply about compassion for people who were treated badly. Then, as I learned more, I gained some understanding of broader issues. At that time, the corporate takeover of agriculture was just gaining momentum and I wanted a way to oppose that. The United Farm Workers union was one of the few entities directly taking on agribusiness giants such as Gallo and InterHarvest. So our family started boycotting grapes and a few years later I moved to CA to be a full time volunteer for the UFW (and even got to hear Chris Hartmire speak once). Although I was only there for a few months, it was an experience that changed my life.
As Cesar Chavez put it, having a liberal religious background provided me with a way to "interpret" a national movement, beyond my own limited experience, in terms that I could understand. And that has been true for millions of people throughout our history, from the anti-slavery movement, to the Catholic Worker movment, the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement in the Vietnam era, and the Poor People's Campaign, among others.
The importance of social justice movements such as Tikkun Olam, Engaged Buddhism, Reconciling Ministries, and so many others within a wide variety of religious traditions, has been obscured by corporate-controlled media bent on serving up circus acts instead of real information.