A friendship for the ages
*Kerry Kennedy writes about her father’s (Bobby Kennedy) friendship with Cesar Chavez. It’s a piece about a special bond between two visionaries, about their legacy and the work to be done. VL
By Kerry Kennedy, San Jose Mercury News
Nearly 50 years ago, my father, Robert F. Kennedy, boarded a plane to Delano, California, to visit Cesar Chavez. It was to be only the third meeting between these two men, whose backgrounds were a study in contrasts.
[pullquote]They recognized in each other a fierce commitment to justice and an unshakeable belief in the individual’s ability to bring it about.[/pullquote]They were about the same age, they were both Catholics, and they had both served in the Navy, but the similarities stopped there.
At the time of his flight to Delano on March 10, 1968, my father was a U.S. senator, a former U.S. attorney general and a graduate of Harvard and the University of Virginia Law School. His father had been America’s ambassador to Great Britain, and his older brother had been president.
[pullquote][tweet_dis]That was the heart of Chavez’s vision: empowering Latino and Filipino-American farmworkers to demand that they be recognized as human beings.[/tweet_dis][/pullquote]Chavez, on the other hand, was born on an Arizona homestead, the son of Mexican immigrants. He grew up in a small adobe house without electricity or running water, and he quit school after the eighth grade to work alongside his family in California’s fields, backbreaking labor that paid almost nothing.
But beneath these superficial differences, they shared a deep bond. They recognized in each other a fierce commitment to justice and an unshakeable belief in the individual’s ability to bring it about.
Click HERE to read the full story.
[Photo courtesy of CA Depatment of Education]
