Cesar Chavez Ties Nonviolence to the Dinner Table

Cesar Chavez was born in Yuma, Arizona, on March 31, 1927, and grew up to build the United Farm Workers around one hard rule: no violence, ever, toward the other side. In February 1968 he tested that rule on himself, fasting on water alone at the union's Forty Acres headquarters in Delano until his doctors made him stop three weeks in; he broke the fast publicly on March 10. Sometime after, he stopped eating animals too, and stayed vegetarian for the rest of his life, telling people plainly that animals feel afraid, cold, hungry and unhappy the same way people do. He kept working the point on friends and strangers alike, by his own aides' account almost as eagerly as he worked people toward the union. In 1992 the group In Defense of Animals gave him a lifetime achievement award, and he used the speech to argue that cruelty to animals and cruelty to people came from the same source.