Are Our Heroes? : Some Say the Spirit of Leaders Like Cesar Chavez Lives On, but Wonder If a Cynical America Can Hear Their Quiet Call to Action

On the day they buried Cesar Chavez, the laborers who work the land and the politicians who govern it stood side by side.

They spoke with reverence of a man who organized the poor; with love for a life shaped by sacrifice; with sadness for the passing of an era.

And as thousands celebrated Chavez’s life, a question hung in the air: Are there others like him?

They can be found, some say, on the streets of the South Bronx, in the fields of Central California and in the churches of South and East Los Angeles. They contend the spirit embodied in such nonviolent leaders as Chavez, Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi is very much alive. It is just more diffused, they say, and further from the spotlight.

Several factors have made it more difficult for such leaders to rise. In the decades since Martin Luther King Jr. marched and was murdered, since Chavez fought wealthy farmers and won, there have been Reaganomics and recession, Watergate and war. These events and others have created a cynical national mood, many say, which makes it hard for many Americans to believe in heroes.

“It’s like an Ice Age of the human spirit has set in now, and it makes it terribly difficult for a figure like that to rise and flourish,” says former ABC newsman Marshall Frady, whose New Yorker magazine article last October contrasted the philosophies of King and Malcolm X. “The scrutiny is more relentless. . . . One of the initial questions is: ‘What’s he really after? What’s in it for him?’ There might be some suspicion of anyone who even appears to be a hero.”

Neither is there national consensus on what a hero should be. The definition of a moral or philosophical leader, experts say, has always depended on whom is doing the defining.

“One person’s hero is another person’s villain,” says USC religion professor Jack Crossley.

Ronald Reagan was equally loved as despised, heralded by some as a strong leader who salvaged America’s economy and world image, vilified by others as one who steered the nation into a downward spiral. Four years after he left office, Ross Perot emerged, capturing the country’s imagination for a time and becoming a folk hero to millions who saw him as a modern-day Horatio Alger hero willing to spend his own fortune to help the United States.

“Then you have the phenomenon of the antihero,” Crossley says, “a hero for the underclass who exemplifies qualities that the dominant class would find abhorrent.” James Dean was such a hero, he says. And so are many rap artists today.

But whatever one’s criteria, nonviolent leaders with charisma and national influence are rare. They emerge from a convergence of circumstances that the nation may not see for some time, activists say.

“If we have to wait for another Dr. King or Chavez it would be like waiting for Godot,” says Larry B. McNeil, West Coast director of the Industrial Areas Foundation, a group that helps establish grass-roots organizations around the country. “There are historical circumstances that contribute to those people coming about, and the chances that’s going to happen (again) in our lifetime are (remote).”

Such figures must have the trust of a sizable segment of the population, Crossley says: “And then there’s got to be a catalyst that makes it work, an identifiable enemy. With Gandhi it was the separatists and the British. With King it was segregation laws. And with Chavez it was the growers.

“Now, the oppressor is not nearly so easily identifiable.”

A sympathetic public is also important for the ascent of such figures. Without it, the cause championed by a nonviolent leader may fail to assume the needed moral urgency. But during the last two decades, the public has seemed to tire of tackling the social problems that fixated the nation during the 1960s.

“I think there was a national backwash of spirit after those huge emotional exertions,” Frady says. “The mood of the country generally became much more self-absorbed and weary of the moral obligations of the nonviolent agenda.”

And the media, particularly television--so critical in delivering images of the struggles for civil and workers’ rights during the 1960s--seem to have lost interest in nonviolent actions, preferring the quick and dramatic to the pensive and peaceful.

Nowadays, “the media (are) terribly reactive to big, violent events,” says Ronald B. Taylor, a former Los Angeles Times reporter who covered Chavez and wrote a book on his United Farm Workers union. “We’re jaded, I suppose.”

But the media’s role in illuminating nonviolent leaders and struggles is as important as ever. “Something can’t grow these days without the media focusing on it,” Crossley explains. “The movement, the leader and the people appear (first). The media can accelerate their power.”

In the 1960s, mass demonstrations, boycotts and the figures who led them were considered novel, activists and writers say. Now that the newness has worn off, media interest has faded. Even Chavez, who campaigned for higher farm wages just nine months before his death, received scant coverage in recent years.

Some critics believe the lack of media interest can be traced to the fact that many nonviolent tactics either take a long time to be effective or fail to generate the dramatic images favored particularly by television news.

It took five years, for example, for a strike and boycott to force major growers to sign contracts with the UFW in 1970. And letter-writing campaigns, while compelling, do not make for exciting pictures.

Yet, despite the lack of attention and the mood of a cynical society, many people still use nonviolent means to seek social justice. Hundreds of individuals have stepped into the void once filled by one or two larger-than-life personas.

“When you till the soil and plant organizational seeds, it’s possible for ordinary people to do heroic things,” says Lou Negrete, a senior leader for United Neighborhoods Organization in East L. A. “The media . . . perpetuate that expectation that some charismatic leader will come around and rescue the poor. That’s not going to happen. The poor have to organize themselves.”

In the 25 years since Chavez launched the UFW’s historic grape boycott, individuals have organized protests and civil disobedience for causes ranging from the environment to nuclear disarmament.

In 1987, three church-based groups whose members came from Los Angeles’ minority, working-class communities, organized and rallied for a “moral” minimum wage.

The collective efforts of UNO, the South Central Organizing Committee and the East Valleys Organization helped raise California’s minimum wage from $3.35 to $4.25 an hour. These three groups and another grass-roots organization, VOICE, are building a complex of townhouses for working-class families in Bell Gardens, and are backing a countywide campaign to help keep youths out of gangs.

In Central California, UFW Vice President Dolores Huerta has continued efforts to seek better treatment of fieldworkers. The Rev. Johnny Ray Youngblood and his New York City congregation help build housing for the poor and provide help to drug addicts. And activists such as Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund have spent decades fighting for the rights of young people.

“There are thousands of us who draw energy from things Chavez, and King and Bobby Kennedy did,” says Jim Drake, a grass-roots organizer in the South Bronx, N.Y., who began working with Chavez in the 1960s. “I think that’s a great tradition very much alive today.”

Activists admit that some younger people, after watching unemployment rise, wages fall and civil rights gains erode, wonder what the fabled nonviolent struggles have really accomplished.

Linda Schoyer, co-director of education at the Pittsburgh Peace Institute, says the concept has become distorted with time. She recalls how a professor, attending a class she gave on alternatives to war, asked if nonviolence was simply giving up.

“When he heard nonviolence he equated it with passivism, walking away from a fight,” Schoyer says. “I said, ‘We’re talking about action that often takes a lot more courage and bravery.’ And you could see this light go on, as though he’d never thought of it in that way.”

Still, many activists note that tactics associated with previous nonviolent struggles have been adopted by contemporary movements, such as last month’s Gay Rights March on Washington and protests by Greenpeace, animal-rights groups and some leaders on both sides of the abortion debate. And more college students and community organizers have adopted the concept when tackling complex social problems.

It’s understandable that some yearn for a larger-than-life persona to represent struggles for justice, says Frady: “I tend to think that we need an apostle every now and then to the degree they lend that focus and direction, the drama and the theater.”

But others say it is perhaps a good thing there are no contemporary figures like King or Chavez to symbolize a whole struggle.

“Maybe we’ve depended too much on waiting for others to win our rights and fight for our causes,” says Father David O’Connell, of the South Central Organizing Committee. “I think people are realizing we can’t wait anymore for individuals to take responsibility for our lives. . . . I think people are more and more willing to take on leadership themselves.”

Too often, many say, the death of a legendary figure creates the perception the movement they represented has died with them. But with numerous individuals struggling onward, albeit in relative obscurity, the struggle never ends.

There are efforts to put Chavez’s likeness on a postage stamp. On Tuesday, the L. A. City Council voted to name a thoroughfare for him, and children will likely attend schools bearing his name someday.

But many who marched beside Chavez say they hope he does not become canonized. Then, his virtues would seem unattainable.

That would be unfortunate, they explain, because Chavez’s greatest achievement was teaching others to find the heroes within themselves.

“I know people are saying I hope we find another Dr. King, another Chavez,” says the IAF’s McNeil. “I’d say stop hoping and start organizing. There’s some part of us that hopes somebody else knows more than we.

“But my experience tells me the best people to solve problems are those being affected by them.”