2. Labor Organizer Eugene Nelson Describes Being Arrested By Starr County Police

Labor organizer Eugene Nelson, featured in the KHOU-TV news footage, was a close associate of Cesar Chavez and had been active in the Delano, California grape strike and boycott before moving to South Texas to help organize the melon strike.

In the excerpt below, Nelson describes his interactions with police, while working alongside Dolores Huerta, early on in the strike.

Arrests and beatings by police and Texas Rangers would become common over the next year, ultimately leading to a hearing by US Senators.

Statement Regarding My Detention in the Starr County Jail on or About June 8, 1966

On June 2, 1966, four Starr Country growers and shippers obtained a restraining order prohibiting all picketing at the entrances to their farms and packing sheds.

On or about June 8, Dolores Huerta, Vice President of the National Farm Workers Association, and I were standing at the end of a public street near the Roma International Bridge talking to strikebreakers from Mexico, asking them not to break the strike. We were pleading with them in a completely peaceful manner. We were at least ten miles away from the nearest ranch or packing shed mentioned in the restraining order…

About 6:30AM Raul Pena, Starr County Sheriff’s Office chief deputy approached us.

“So, you’re disobeying the restraining order, Mr. Nelson!” he said in a rude and sarcastic voice.

“No, I’m not disobeying the restraining order,” I said in a polite voice…

I explained to him politely the terms of the restraining order, which I had read carefully several times. He kept insisting I was violating the restraining order, and asked me to get in the police car with him.

“Are you arresting me?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “but Mr. Nye wants to talk to you.” (Mr. Nye is the County Attorney.)

I agreed to go with him. While driving me to the jail at Rio Grande City, fourteen miles away, he kept tapping his fingers excitedly on the back of the seat, occasionally touching his gun. It seemed to me he either was impatient to shoot me, or wished to convey this impression to me to frighten me. About halfway to Rio Grande City, he stopped at a private home, entered, and returned to the car about five minutes later.

Then I was taken to the Starr County Jail and locked in a cell, without being booked.

About four hours later I was taken to a room in the courthouse, where County Attorney Randall Nye talked with me. He said nothing about my violating the restraining order. He told me that there had been some threats of violence, including a threat to bomb the courthouse (which I knew nothing about whatsoever), and that I was being held for investigation by the FBI…In my opinion it was a completely dishonest scheme in an attempt to get publicity implying the union or its members had threatened violence, without any basis in fact whatsoever.

Several months later when I was giving an FBI agent, a Mr. Wilson, a report on police brutality, I asked him about this incident. He told me that the FBI had been contacted on this occasion, but that they had not been presented with any sort of evidence which they felt justified an investigation, and had never dispatched anyone to make such an investigation.

Eugene Nelson

SOURCE:

Eugene Nelson, “Statements Concerning My Arrest and Detention in the Starr County Jail,” March 18, 1967, Henry P. Anderson papers, 1944-2014, Labor Archives and Research Center, https://archive.org/details/csfst_007203.