The below biographies are stolen from the LA Times Festival guide:
Joshua Bloom: Bloom is a fellow at the Ralph J. Bunche Center at UCLA. He is the coeditor of "Working for Justice: The L.A. Model of Organizing and Advocacy and the editor of the Black Panther Newspaper Collection. He is the coauthor of "Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party."
Matt Garcia: Garcia is the director of the School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. He also directs the Comparative Border Studies Program. His forthcoming book, "From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement," explores the formation of the most successful consumer boycott in U.S. history and the grassroots activists and union leaders who created it.
Seth Rosenfeld: Rosenfeld is an independent journalist based in San Francisco. A former investigative reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco Examiner, he has won the George Polk Award and other national honors. He has contributed to the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and Harper's. His most recent book is "Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power."
The below are my notes -- flawed as they might be:
Seth Rosenfeld: In 1964, the Free Speech Movement started. LSD was still legal. War protests. Berkeley was the epicenter for these issues. His book looks at FBI involvement at Berkeley. Mario Savio, one of the leaders at Berkeley, was born in New York. He thought he was going to be a priest. He began questioning the dogma and broke with his Catholic faith, but left with the idea to do good. He got involved in the Civil Rights Movement and went to Mississippi in 1964 for voter registration drives.
At Berkeley, he found out there was a ban on political activity on the campus of Berkeley. He emerged as a leader, but didn't want the power.
Joshua Bloom: Why the emergence of Black Panther Party after the non-violent movement? Why the shift? The logic and dynamics of the Civil Rights movement was coming apart. There was an antagonistic relationship that started between the police and blacks. There was a lack of black involvement in the political machines of the North and West.
Everyone tries to make the most of the social space they live in. Do great men make history or does structural processes make history? Black Panther Party resulted from changes in structure -- especially the response to police brutality. There were charismatic leaders. There were different leaders who had idfferent strengths in philosophy and organization. People saw an organization that could help them.
Matt Garcia: Cesar Chavez studied Gandhi and MLK to control the violence of his followers. There was a realization that a strike by workers was not enough. What to do when harvest was over? Needed to keep people engaged. Almost as an after thought the group came up with the idea of a boycott. Brought LA/SF into it. Then went national.
Cesar Chavez was very soft spoken. Pious, but determined to reach his goals. Was right person at the time; however, movement was built around one person. The Farmer Movement never looked at structure/governing. This became a weakness as other voices were not heard. Without Cesar Chavez there would be not movement, but over-time the lack of structure hurt.
Why take on Cesar Chavez? Farm workers are little better off now. Why didn't the movement result in long lasting benefits? Garica feels it was his responsibility to look at what went wrong.
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