Waking up on Wednesday, I was prepared to spend the morning poring over all the results from the day before. What I didn’t anticipate was that my world would be rocked by a story from the New York Times entitled “Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, Is Accused of Abusing Girls for Years.”
Waking up on Wednesday morning after the Illinois Primary election, I was prepared to spend the morning poring over all the results from the day before. What I didn’t anticipate was that my world would be rocked by a story from the New York Times entitled “Cesar Chavez, a Civil Rights Icon, Is Accused of Abusing Girls for Years.”
I am writing this on, March 18, 2026, to explain to my colleagues and friends my regret and utter disgust in what I now know to be the real Cesar Chavez.
Anyone, having visited my Springfield office, will have noticed the picture on my wall (not anymore, however) of myself with Cesar Chavez at a press conference, probably around 1972 to 1973. I would have been 23 or 24 years old. I was a staff member of the National Farm Worker Ministry, having joined while in seminary in Dayton, Ohio, and working with the UFW.
I was proud to tell people that I had worked for the farmworkers’ movement and Cesar Chavez for six years. In fact, I met my wife, Nora, in Cleveland in 1973, where I was the director of the United Farm Workers Boycott office. (The boycott of lettuce and grapes, was the economic tool used by Cesar to bring growers to the table to negotiate union contracts for farmworkers). After our marriage in 1976, we moved to New York City, where I took over as director of the boycott there. While in New York, I was able to work with Fred Ross, the person who found Cesar in California in the early 1960’s and taught him and everyone else in the union about organizing. Fred was a protégé of Saul Alinsky. It was also in New York that our first daughter was born.
In 1977, we moved to La Paz, the UFW's headquarters, where I served as the National Farm Worker Ministry director of the California Division. Nora and I lived in a mobile home in La Paz, because we had a family at that point. We had many friends in La Paz. Nora became involved in community-building activities for the community and its staff members.
We ended up leaving the farm workers in the summer of 1978, after realizing that living on $10 a week, plus room and board, was not something we wanted to do for the rest of our lives. And so, we moved to Peoria, to work at Peoria Friendship House of Christian Service. They wanted an ordained minister/community organizer to work on Peoria’s Near Northside neighborhood.
The New York Times article listed many of the people with whom we lived and worked. We were all devoted to Cesar and the cause of bringing justice and dignity to America’s farmworkers. He was bigger than life to most of us. He would break his nationally publicized fasts, which he did to bring attention to the plight of farmworkers, with notables like Bobby Kennedy, and Coretta Scott King.
The UFW became a powerful political force, helping Jerry Brown become Governor of California and other politicos in the 1970’s. Hollywood was also no stranger to Cesar and the UFW. I remember, during a California ballot proposition regarding farmworkers, going to rallies and seeing Kris Kristofferson and Sissy Spacek lending their support.
And so, to hear that the current leadership of the UFW was suspending all celebration activities for Cesar’s birthday on March 31st, I knew there was something to the story. When women say they were raped and abused, we need to believe them. When I read about Dolores Huerta and the abuses that occurred to her and to the girls who were his victims, I believe it.
This has been one of the saddest days in my memory. My hero and idol just came crashing down off his pedestal. I don’t regret spending six years of my life working for the cause of farmworkers, because it is still important. But I do regret having put so much faith, trust and admiration in a man who will now go down in history as a pedophile and a rapist.
