By: HISTORY.com Editors
Labor organizer and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez begins hunger strike
On May 11, 1972, Mexican American labor organizer and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez begins a hunger strike. The strike, which he undertook in opposition to an Arizona law severely restricting farm workers' ability to organize, lasted 24 days and drew national attention to the suffering of itinerant farm workers in the Southwest.
A fervent admirer of Mahatma Gandhi, Chavez had undertaken several hunger strikes before. As a co-founder of the United Farm Workers, he and his strikes had played important roles in many major labor actions, including the five-year Delano Grape Strike in California. In response to the wave of organizing that had swept the region, Arizona's legislature passed a bill that constricted workers' rights to organize, outlawed secondary boycotts, and allowed growers to obtain a restraining order to prevent strikes during the harvest. Despite an outcry from farm workers and Chavez's request that they meet to discuss the bill, Governor Jack Williams immediately signed it into law. Later that day, Chavez began his fast.
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An increasingly emaciated Chavez appeared regularly at mass, attended by his supporters and others from the Civil Rights Movement. Coretta Scott King, whose husband Martin Luther King Jr. had supported Chavez in his previous strikes, attended one such mass, as did Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern. Chavez referred to the strike as "a fast of sacrifice," repeatedly reminding observers that his suffering was meant to represent the daily suffering of farm workers.
Finally, after 24 days, he ended his fast at a memorial mass for Bobby Kennedy, who had thrown his political support behind Chavez's cause in the years prior to his 1968 assassination. The following year, Chavez and the UFW organized another major agricultural strike, the Lettuce Growers Strike, and in 1975 California passed a landmark law affirming workers' rights to boycott and to collective bargaining.
Chavez's legacy was revisited in March 2026, when an investigation revealed that several women who were connected to the movement in their youth said the labor leader had, for years, sexually abused them when they were girls. In response, the Cesar Chavez Foundation said it would work "with leaders in the Farmworker Movement to be responsive to these allegations, support the people who may have been harmed by his actions, and ensure we are united and guided by our commitment to justice and community empowerment."
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Citation Information
- Article Title
- Labor organizer and civil rights activist Cesar Chavez begins hunger strike
- Author
- HISTORY.com Editors
- Website Name
- History
- Date Accessed
- October 21, 2026
- Publisher
- A&E Television Networks
- Last Updated
- May 11, 2026
- Original Published Date
- September 26, 2019
