Why Marshall Ganz Joined the Farm Worker Movement

Marshall Ganz was raised in a Jewish household in Bakersfield, California, 30 miles south of Delano. In 1964 he volunteered for the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, known as Freedom Summer, an effort led by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to register Black voters in Mississippi. He dropped out of Harvard to work for SNCC full time, and he joined the farm worker movement in 1965.

I felt myself called to the civil rights movement for several reasons. For three years following World War II, my family had lived in Germany, where my father served as an army chaplain. He worked with “displaced persons,” survivors of the Holocaust, whom I met as a child as they passed through our home. Although I was too young to grasp the full horror of what had occurred, the people whom I’d met had clearly survived a catastrophe. My parents, especially my mother, who had grown up in Virginia, taught me that the Holocaust was the result not only of anti-Semitism, but also of racism—and that racism could kill. It was an evil. And that was what civil rights was fighting.

I had also grown up on years of Passover seders—that celebration of the ancient journey from slavery to freedom. This … journey, I was told as a child … was my journey, and I had been a slave in Egypt. Although it took me a while to figure this out, I came to see that this was a journey that passes from generation to generation …

[T]he civil rights struggle proclaimed itself the “freedom movement.” It was also a movement of young people: Dr. King had been only 25 when he led the Montgomery bus boycott, and many leaders of the sit-ins, freedom rides, and voter registration drives were even younger. This was no accident. Often, young people see the world with what some call a “prophetic imagination” that combines a critical view of what is with a hopeful view of what could be. And because I shared their values, I found myself challenged and called by their spirit of commitment, courage, and hope. So, in the summer of 1964, I volunteered for the Mississippi Summer Project, and when the time came to return to school for my senior year, I went to work for SNCC (the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) instead.

In the fall of 1965, I returned home to Bakersfield, just 30 miles south of Delano, California, where Cesar Chavez had just begun a grape strike. Although I had grown up in the midst of the farm worker world, I had never really seen it. But Mississippi had taught many of us … how race, politics, and power work in America. This gave me the “Mississippi eyes” to see where I had grown up in a new way. I now saw farm workers who faced challenges not unlike those faced by their southern counterparts: no voting power, low wages … Now, they too were fighting back with their own movement. In October 1965, my friends … introduced me to Cesar [Chavez]. After a weekend driving him around on one of his Bay Area fundraising trips, he asked me to join him. So I began working with the farm workers, a calling I would pursue for the next 16 years … I served as the Bakersfield organizer; march to Sacramento coordinator … boycott director, organizing director, and national Executive Board member from 1973 to 1981…

I am blessed to have had the opportunity to participate in the farm worker movement … One lesson I learned is that things don’t have to be the way they are, but they don’t change by themselves. Challenging the status quo takes commitment, courage, imagination, and, above all, a dedication to learning. ¹

Discussion Questions

1. What key lessons did Marshall Ganz take from his family background, religious traditions, and encounters with Holocaust survivors?
2. How did these lessons influence his decision to join the civil rights movement? 
3. Ganz writes that he “had never really seen” the farm worker world, even though he grew up near it. How did the civil rights movement change the way he saw his own community in California? How did the civil rights movement shape his universe of obligation?
4. How does Ganz define the term “prophetic imagination”? How does this idea help explain why young people are drawn to social movements like the civil rights and farm worker movements?

Teach a Facing History lesson featuring this resource.

• 1Marshall Ganz, Why David Sometimes Wins: Leadership, Organization, and Strategy in the California Farm Worker Movement (Oxford University Press, 2009), vii–viii.