[“So, fighting and organizing for racial and economic justice is
in my DNA,” Ross said on many occasions. He acknowledged that he had
gotten into a fair amount of trouble doing his organizing work —
“good trouble, as John Lewis used to say"]
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REMEMBERING FRED ROSS JR., ONE OF NATION’S LEADING LABOR AND SOCIAL
MOVEMENT ORGANIZERS  
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Louis Freedberg
November 27, 2022
Stansbury Forum
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_ “So, fighting and organizing for racial and economic justice is
in my DNA,” Ross said on many occasions. He acknowledged that he had
gotten into a fair amount of trouble doing his organizing work —
“good trouble, as John Lewis used to say" _

Fred Ross Jr. with Cesar Chavez and Chavez’ dog Huelga at UFW
headquarters in La Paz, California during 1970s., Photo courtesy of
UFW

 

Fred Ross, one of the nation’s leading labor organizers who began
his work at an early age in the lettuce fields of California alongside
Cesar Chavez, but whose work had an impact far beyond labor organizing
on both a national and international level, has died. 

He played a pivotal role in successful efforts to propel Congressional
action to change policies propping up oppressive governments in
Central America, advocating to accelerate the naturalization of legal
immigrants in the US, and in getting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
elected to Congress for the first time.

He died of cancer at his home in Berkeley, California, just weeks
after celebrating his 75th birthday and receiving tributes from
hundreds of friends and colleagues. 

One tribute came from former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert
Reich.  “You have comforted the afflicted, and afflicted the
comfortable,” he told Ross.  “Your boldness and vision have been
a source of inspiration to me and huge number of other people, working
for social justice, labor unions, and the hopes and dreams so many
people have for a better life.”

Ross’ brilliance was to take what he learned from Chavez as well as
his father, Fred Ross Sr., himself a legendary organizer, combine
those lessons with a savvy use of the media and field campaigns of
local volunteers, to put pressure on state governments and Congress to
advance a variety of causes – and when necessary, help elect
candidates sympathetic to those causes.

One of those candidates was Pelosi, then a leader in the Democratic
National Committee.  Using some of the techniques learned in his
work with the United Farm Workers, he organized the Get Out the Vote
campaign for her first successful run for Congress in 1987 in San
Francisco. Ten years later he joined forces again with Pelosi as her
district director in her Congressional office in San Francisco.

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ELECTION NIGHT: FRED ROSS WITH NANCY PELOSI CELEBRATING VICTORY ON
ELECTION NIGHT AFTER SPECIAL ELECTION FOR CONGRESS ON APRIL 7, 1987
AFTER DEATH OF PHIL BURTON. PHOTO BY ADAM GOTTLIEB

“I personally benefited from Fred’s organizational mastery:
translating his policy goals into effective political action. Without
his early support and brilliant leadership organizing the ground
operation of my first campaign, I would have never become a member of
Congress.” Pelosi said in a statement.

Organizing “in my DNA” 

Born in 1947, Ross began work as a full-time organizer with the United
Farm Workers (UFW) in 1970, the year of the historic general strike in
the lettuce fields of Santa Maria and Salinas in California’s
Central Coast,

Throughout his career, Ross employed the house meeting, a hallmark
grass roots tactic developed by his father while working with
the Community Service Organization
[[link removed]], a Latino civil
rights group Ross Sr. co-founded in 1948 related to Saul Alinsky’s
Industrial Areas Foundation. It involved setting up meetings with
small groups of people in their homes to make change happen in their
communities or in later years to organize unions.

Years later, Ross reprinted many of his father’s sayings and tactics
in a booklet called “Axioms for Organizers”
[[link removed]]which was widely
distributed in English and Spanish throughout the United States and
can be found in union halls and community meetings throughout the
Country.

His mother Frances Ross, an original “Rosie the Riveter,” was a
shop steward in a World War II plant in Cleveland, Ohio.  She fought
to help Jewish doctors immigrate from Nazi Germany.  She was a
pioneer in the mental health field and was the first women hired to be
a lobbyist in Sacramento, state capital of California. 

“So, fighting and organizing for racial and economic justice is in
my DNA,” Ross said on many occasions. He acknowledged that he had
gotten into a fair amount of trouble doing his organizing work —
“good trouble, as John Lewis used to say.”  

He recalled being knocked unconscious by a grape grower during a farm
worker election and being shot at by a security guard at a
supermarket. “Luckily he was a bad shot,” he quipped. 

By his own count, he had been arrested 39 times, “mostly for good
causes.” 

Organizing with UFW

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1997: FARMWORKERS DEMONSTRATING, SALINAS, CA. PHOTO: ROBERT GUMPERT

In early 1975 Fred conceived of, and organized a 110-mile march
against Gallo
[[link removed]] wines
that began in Union Square in San Francisco and ended with at least
10,000 farm workers and supporters at the company’s headquarters in
Modesto in the Central Valley of California.  At the time, it was
estimated that Gallo Wines sold 1 in 3 bottles of wine in the United
States. The UFW had by then been dismissed by some 
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the media as a “romantic cause” because it was confronting the
powerful alliance with the Teamsters union that growers forged to
suppress farm workers’ support for the UFW. 

“That infuriated me, because I knew it wasn’t the case,” Ross
said in an interview in October.

One of the other motives for the Gallo march was to put pressure on
then-Gov. Jerry Brown to negotiate and push through the Agricultural
Labor Relations Act
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which was enacted in June 1975. It was the first law of its kind in
the nation establishing the right of farm workers to organize, vote in
union elections, and bargain with their employers.

Changing U.S. Policies on Central America  

In the 1980s, Ross led Neighbor to Neighbor, a grassroots organization
initially focused on dealing with the plight of refugees from El
Salvador, Nicaragua, and Guatemala.  It grew into a much larger
effort to address U.S. policies in those countries that contributed to
the refugee problem in the first place.  “No one had developed a
successful political strategy to challenge these policies in Congress,
“ Ross recalled.   

Neighbor to Neighbor sent organizers to swing congressional districts
around the country to elect representatives critical of the Reagan
administration policies in Central America, and to put pressures on
incumbents to change their positions.  These efforts played a part
in ending aid to the Contras, the U.S. backed rebel forces in
Nicaragua, and helped elect three women to Congress backing those
changes.  Rep Louise Slaughter, D-NY, served in Congress from 1987
until her death in 2018.  Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Palo Alto, also elected
in 1987, is still in Congress.

Helps Elect Pelosi to Congress

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FRED ROSS, RESPONSIBLE FOR THE GET OUT THE VOTE CAMPAIGN FOR NANCY
PELOSI FIRST RUN FOR CONGRESS IN 1987, WITH PELOSI AT HER CAMPAIGN
HEADQUARTERS IN SAN FRANCISCO IN 1987. PHOTO: ADAM GOTTLIEB

The third woman was Nancy Pelosi, who asked Ross and Neighbor to
Neighbor to run her get out the vote campaign.  She was familiar
with Ross’ work around Central America, as well as his leadership
role
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then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein’s successful defeat of a recall campaign
against her in 1983.  

Again, using tactics honed during his farm worker organizing days,
Ross helped organize 118 house meetings, and enlisted over a thousand
volunteers. As Ross recounted it, Pelosi’s father Thomas
D’Alesandro, a former mayor of Baltimore who knew the value of
neighborhood-based precinct organizers, sent Pelosi’s brother
Thomas, generally called Tommy, to San Francisco “to make sure that
Ross and this crew knew what they were doing.”  

On one Sunday, Tommy, who also had served a term as mayor of
Baltimore, tagged along with candidate Pelosi to 17 house meetings
held over a 12-hour period.  Ross also brought out a chart
indicating that the campaign needed to identify 5,000 more voters and
get 3,500 of them to vote.  

At the end of the day Tommy called his father back in Baltimore to
report that “Dad, they’re doing it better than we did. Nothing to
worry about.” 

Pelosi won her race by a narrow margin, embarking on a decades-long
career that led her to historic terms as House Speaker. “You will
always have my deepest gratitude as one of my earliest and most
significant supporters,” Pelosi told Ross on his 75th birthday. 

After the defeat of Contra aid, Neighbor to Neighbor shifted its focus
to El Salvador, to pressure the government there to withdraw its
support of death squads. To that end, Ross led a drive to boycott
Salvadoran coffee, one of the country’s most lucrative exports,
which he argued helped underwrite the military regime there.  

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FRED ROSS AT A NEIGHBOR TO NEIGHBOR RALLY IN 1990 ON STEPS OF SAN
FRANCISCO CITY HALL PROMOTING BOYOTT OF SALVADORAN COFFEE. PHOTO
COURTESY OF NEIGHBOR TO NEIGHBOR.

A key turning point was when the International Longshoreman’s and
Warehousemen’s Union under its president, Jimmy Herman, endorsed the
boycott.  Longshoremen  refused to cross picket lines set up by
Neighbor to Neighbor
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and down the West Coast, including at its last stop in Long Beach
[[link removed]].  As
a result, the Ciudad de Buenaventura ship was unable to off-load its
cargo of 34 tons of Salvadoran coffee and was forced to sail back to
El Salvador with the coffee still in its hold. That effectively sealed
off the West Coast to Salvadoran coffee imports for the next two
years. 

The threat of further economic damage played a part in forcing the
Salvadoran government to the negotiating table, and in 1992 the
counterinsurgency war against the FMLN, a leftist guerilla
organization, came to an end.

Helping Legal Residents Become Citizens and Voters 

In the 1990s, Ross embarked on a campaign to shorten to six months the
time it took legal immigrants to become citizens after they applied,
and then to register them to vote. In the aftermath of Prop. 187, the
anti-immigrant initiative backed by then Gov. Pete Wilson, he helped
launch the Active Citizenship Campaign which, with the intervention of
then Vice President Al Gore, successfully put pressure on the
Immigration and Naturalization Service to speed up the naturalization
process. 

“We not only played a tangible role in putting pressure on the INS
to help thousands become citizens in time to vote in that next
election, but more importantly, to become a lot more engaged in the
whole political process,” recalled Ross.  “That was the
beginning of a real breakthrough in continuing to build Latino voting
power in California in the aftermath of Prop 187.”

Training “Organizing Stewards”

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FRED ROSS SPEAKS AT AN ORGANIZING STEWARDS TRAINING IN JAN 2020 AT THE
INTERNATIONAL BROTHERHOOD OF ELECTRICAL WORKERS LOCAL 1245 UNION HALL
IN VACAVILLE. . CREDIT: PHOTO BY PETER STOREY

In 1998, Ross returned to his labor roots by organizing health care
workers for the Service Employees International Union, working closely
with Eileen Purcell, whom he described as “my organizing partner of
a lifetime.” For 13 years with the International Brotherhood of
Electrical Workers Local 1245, he developed a nationally recognized
program to train union members to go beyond being stewards that
handled union affairs, but to be organizers while keeping their
regular jobs at Pacific Gas and Electric. These “organizer
stewards,” as Ross called them, would volunteer on non-work time to
fight anti-union right-to-work legislation or work in electoral races
in their own states or elsewhere.  If necessary, they would take a
leave from their regular jobs while being paid by the union to do so,
but always return to their regular jobs with PG&E.    Among the
races these organizers participated were the Senate campaigns of Rev.
Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff in Georgia two years ago.  Their
election returned control of the Senate to Democrats after a half
dozen years with a GOP majority. 

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FRED ROSS WITH FRED ROSS SR. PHOTO: ANNE MARIE STAAS

Most recently, Ross was working on producing a documentary film on his
father that underscored the critical role of organizing, with an
emphasis on one-on-one relationships that could be forged to build
collective power.  Even after being diagnosed with a terminal
illness, he worked tirelessly to raise funds for the film, which is
being directed by Ray Telles. 

As the United Farm Workers said in a tribute, “His father Fred Ross
Sr. had remarkable accomplishments. But perhaps his best legacy was
Fred Jr.  Colleagues over many decades said Fred Jr.’s organizing
talents matched anyone’s, including Cesar and Fred Sr.”

“As with his father, Fred Jr.’s labors were never about
himself,” the UFW tribute stated. “He was always about empowering
others to believe they were responsible for the progress they won.
Fred Jr.’s nature was ceaselessly positive; he always thought things
could be done.”

Throughout his life, Ross exemplified the principles of organizing he
wrote about in an introduction to Jacques Levy’s Cesar Chavez:
Autobiography of La Causa.  
[[link removed]] “I
learned from Cesar Chavez and my father that the organizer works
behind the scenes, patiently asking questions, listening respectfully,
agitating, teaching new leaders, pushing them to take action, and
creating hope con ánimo, with great enthusiasm. The organizer finds
people one at a time, teaches them to develop their own powerful
voices, turns their anger about injustice into hope by encouraging
them to take action, raises hell, stirs up trouble and has fun doing
it.”

Ross, a longtime Berkeley resident, is survived by his wife, Margo
Feinberg, a prominent labor attorney, counsel to many significant
labor organizing campaigns and author of innovative local legislation
geared to enhance the rights of workers; their two children, Charley
and Helen Ross; brother Robert Ross and sister Julia Ross; and a
legion of friends and family members and generations of organizers.

In lieu of flowers, the Ross family asks that contributions go to
the Fred Ross Project [[link removed]]. Written
condolences to the family may be sent to [email protected]

_Louis Freedberg is a veteran journalist. He first met Ross in 1987
when, finding common ground, Ross gave him space in the Neighbor to
Neighbor offices in San Francisco to run the U.S.-South Africa Sister
Community Project._

* community organizing
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* United Farm Workers
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* Cesar Chavez
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* Nancy Pelosi
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* social justice
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