wfn.org | UCC Synod remembers historic farm worker pilgrimage

[powellb@ucc.org]

United Church of Christ
General Synod Newsroom
Monday, July 14, 2003
newsroom@ucc.org
http://www.ucc.org

By William C. Winslow and Irwin Smallwood

MINNEAPOLIS -- The beer belly and the cross faced off in the stifling heat
of California's Coachella Valley. Defiant grape growers had hired the Hells
Angels to break up a strike called by the then-fledgling United Farm
Workers. Two thousand miles away in St. Louis, at General Synod 9, in 1973,
delegates were debating how they could help the farm workers, when someone
shouted, "Let's go to California."

So it was that 95 volunteers, paying their own way, chartered a DC-9 and
quickly found themselves face to face with what one participant described
as a line of armed thugs. In tense but nonviolent witness, the cross won
out.

On Monday, at General Synod, 30 years later, amid thunderous applause, a
hardy band of 15 of these original "grape saints" barnstormed into the
plenary to rekindle the flame of UCC support for farm workers.

They also got a chance to relive their sometimes-terrifying adventure. With
red union flags waving, three of the four living UCC presidents, the Revs.
John H. Thomas, Paul H. Sherry, and Avery D. Post, were on hand for the
celebration. The Rev. Joseph H. Evans was in attendance at Synod, but was
unable to take part in the parade.

The California trip "changed my life forever," remembers the Rev. Marvin
Morgan of Atlanta, Ga., who at the time was co-chair of the UCC youth
caucus. "I remember that the temperature was 106."

The Rev. Bill Klossner of Punta Gorda, Fla., also was transformed. A
20-year-old college student at the time and the youngest member to make the
trip, it was his first experience on a picket line. On the flight, the fear
of the unknown nearly did him in, he said, but the experience "got me out
of my little box" and into "a whole new world."

Delores Huerta, UFW co-founder, and the presidents of three other major
farmworker unions?the Farm Labor Organizing Committee, the Immokalee
Workers of Florida, and Pineros y Campesinos Unidos del Noroestes
(PCUN)?praised the UCC for its support, both then and now. Their words
evoked a flood of memories but none so sweet as the triumphal homecoming of
30 years ago.

On that momentous night in 1973, during the Synod's final business session,
the doors of the meeting hall flung wide open. Ninety-five dirty, sweaty
pilgrims, hefting boxes of grapes over their heads, streamed down the
center aisle, tossing clusters of fruit to the adoring clapping assembly.
All business came to a halt as wildly enthusiastic delegates, staff and
visitors joined the returning heroes in a gigantic conga line.

That excitement still lingers?this time in Minneapolis. After a rousing
call to action by Bernice Powell Jackson, executive minister of Justice and
Witness Ministries, Synod delegates unanimously endorsed continued UCC
support for the farm worker movement.

"Gracias!" shouted Dolores Huerta. "Viva!" the crowd thundered back.