Family of Cesar Chavez has sweet memories of civil rights icon John Lewis
Although iconic activists John Lewis and Cesar Chavez have died, younger generations still look to the intersection between their legacies for inspiration in the push for civil rights.
The link between Lewis and Chavez was present when Chavez’s great-grandchildren, Alejandro and Amelia, met Lewis in 2014 along with their mother, granddaughter in-law Natacha Chavez.
“It was this sweet, genuine moment,” said Natacha Chavez, who watched as Lewis held her 3-year-old son's hand and talked about his admiration for their great-grandfather. “It was very moving and emotional to hear to hear him speak about Cesar and how much he meant to him.”
For Natacha, who is Black, the moment captured the intersectionality embedded in activism between Latino and Black communities.
“The struggle for civil rights for Latinos and African American folks aren’t separate things. It’s one struggle. They worked with each other, they shared the same cause,” she said.
Lewis, who died Friday at age 80 after a battle with pancreatic cancer, was the last living speaker from the 1963 March on Washington, a survivor of Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama, in 1965 and countless instances of police violence. Lewis was an activist integral in passing the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
He was elected in 1986 to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat representing a district in Georgia, a position he held until his death.
Lewis cited Cesar Chavez among his list of inspirations alongside leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi.
Chavez, the Mexican American labor rights activist from Yuma, established the first farmer labor union in the country, now called the United Farm Workers, and fought for decades for the rights of migrants, farm workers and Latinos.
Lewis and Chavez worked together on Sen. Robert Kennedy’s 1968 presidential campaign, door knocking in primarily Black and Latino lower-income Los Angeles neighborhoods. Both of them used nonviolent methods such as marches and strikes to instigate change and call attention to structural injustices.
Natacha, Alejandro and Amelia Chavez met with Lewis nearly six years ago, and his legacy lives on with them. Last week, the family watched “Good Trouble,” a documentary about Lewis' life released two weeks before his death.
It was one of many moments when Natacha and husband, Alejandro, who is one of Chavez's approximately 30 grandchildren, taught their children about equality and intersectionality.
After the movie, the family discussed who John Lewis was and how he met the children's great-grandfather. Natacha said she and Alejandro explain to their children little by little that they are fighting for justice and equality and how some people are not treated the same as others.
“And because of who their great-grandfather was, they kind of understand that a little bit,” Natacaha said. “We try to explain on their level why an issue is important – why we care about the issue, if it’s anything between fighting for Dreamers or Black Lives Matter,” she said.
The Cesar Chavez Foundation paid tribute to the connection between both leaders after Lewis died July 17.
The foundation quoted Lewis, who said of the fight for rights of Black and Latino communities that “Indeed, our struggles were the same, whether they were waged to end Jim Crow oppression in the South or to achieve equality in the great urban cities of the North and Midwest or for recognition and respect in the fields of California.”
Lewis referred to Chavez as a “humble man of deep faith who was a grass-roots worker just like the people he led and who loved him so.”
In 2015, Lewis’ Georgia Congressional office released a statement commemorating Cesar Chavez day on March 31, his birthday.
“As we commemorate Cesar Chavez Day, his life should inspire us all to speak up and speak out against injustice, discrimination, and hate,” Lewis said. “Freedom is the longing of every soul, and when we win victories for a people, as Cesar Chavez did, we champion the cause of all humanity.”