3. Newspaper Coverage of the Strike and March

During the 1960s, some Catholic priests--against the wishes of their colleagues and superiors--were active in the Black Freedom Struggle and in the Vietnam Peace Movement.

The long news story below examines the Starr County strike and the early days of the march as not only a conflict between agricultural workers and growers but also a debate within the Catholic church on the role of the church in social justice issues.

ERNEST MORGAN, “PRIESTS ACTIVE IN STRIKE,” SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS, JULY 7, 1966

The children of farm labor strikers stood on the stage of an old theater in Rio Grande City singing in Spanish and English the theme song of the Negro civil rights movement, “We Shall Overcome.”

As their high voices dipped and soar dint he spiritual music, a young man in the black suit and white collar of a Catholic priest waved his hands directing them. On his left breast he wore the red and white “HUELGA” button of the strikers.

He was Father Jack Gist, associate pastor of a Catholic Church at Lamesa in the Amarillo Diocese, hundreds of miles away. Gist and Father Paul A. Link, pastor of a church at Lockney, were in Rio Grande City with the explicit permission of their bishop at Amarillo.

They had come to help the Latin American farm worker who are striking for a $1.25 minimum wage against vegetable growers in Starr County.

S.A. Priests

They were not the first. Soon after the strike began, priests came to Rio Grande City from Houston and San Antonio. They encouraged the strikers, held mass for them, walked with them in demonstration marches, spoke at rallies and publicly denounced social conditions in the Rio Grande Valley.

“We’re giving notice to the whole world that we’re going to march, march, march until we’ve reached the hour of social justice,” said Rev. Sherrill Smith, a priest from the San Antonio Archdiocese.

He was speaking at a rally which followed a march by the union to the Starr County courthouse in Rio Grande City.

Starr County and the rest of the Valley are in the Diocese of Brownsville. Priests from Rio Grande City and from the Valley have been conspicuously absent from the union’s meetings and marches.

Valley Priests

A labor leader in Harlingen, a long-time organizer, said, however, that Valley priests have gone out of their way to help labor men. Except in certain trades, Valley workers are largely unorganized.

One Valley priest, Rev. Dan Laning, was sharply critical of the outside priests. Speaking form the pulpit of St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Mission, Laning told his congregation:

“These men are imposters. Priests or no priests, they have no business here from the standpoint of support or saying they represent the church.”

The San Antonio priests came in the Valley without invitation, he said. “They are instruders, and they don’t belong here.”

Other Valley priests mildly criticized the outsiders, both for violation of church protocol in coming into another diocese and for attempting to solve the problems of the Valley by “fiery speeches” rather than through negotiations and appeals.

At least one Valley priest, Rev. Phillip Byron of Immaculate Conception Cathedral in Brownsville, has publicly endorsed the strike. He spoke at a meeting of organized labor officials in Harlingen three-and-one-half weeks after the strike began.

The different viewpoints represent dramatically different beliefs on the role of the Christian church in social change—Protestant as well as Catholic. Several Protestant ministers have visited Starr County and supported the strike, and the National Council of Churches has been active.

A McAllen Church of Christ minister Wendle Scott is joining the strikers’ current protest march from Rio Grande City to the Shrine of San Juan at San Juan. With him are seven Latin American Church of Christ ministerial students.

Scott is minister of the Iglesia de Cristo at McAllen, which has a Latin congregation and he heads a Spanish Preacher Training School. After the first day of the march, elders of the Harvey Drive Church of Christ in McAllen told him he would have to vacate the mission and the school, which the church owns.

A spokesman said the role of the church is not in “political issues.”

Scott said his present on the march had also endangered financial support for his school from an Abilene Church of Christ.

Of the leading Catholic laymen in the Valley, as elsewhere, “many hold conservative views in religion as well as politics. They believe the churches’ primary mission is spiritual rather than social leadership.”

Social Ills

Link and Gist and the “intruder” priests are part of the activist group within the church to whom the Vatican Council was a call to action against social ills.

“How can the church not become involved in social work?” said Gist. “The whole tenor of the Vatican Council was involvement in the suffering of humanity.”

“The church is too often identified with the power structure, the status quo.”

“Christ was a rebel, a reformer. The power structure of his time opposed Him.”

“We cannot let the church become a museum of narrow religious practice.”

He and Link sat at a table in the old Catfish Inn in Rio Grande City, an unofficial headquarters of the strike movement because it had a telephone and the official office, the Mexico Theater, did not.

With them were the leader of the union, Eugene Nelson, and several reporters. Nearby were several strikers. Both priests wore the strike buttons and were much the most neatly dressed men there. Sports shirts, often dirty, are the uniforms of the strikers.

The newsmen asked the priests to comment on the criticism of Father Lanie at Mission. Neither would. Asked what the local church was doing in the strike, Link said:

“Why is the local church not represented here? You’ll have to ask them. I’ll say this. Look at the church here and then at the rectory.”

The huge, ancient church near the county courthouse at Rio Grande City is of fading brick. A block away is the rectory where live the priests who serve the church. The rectory is a new two-story brick and wood building. It looks like an expensive modern home, one of the few in Rio Grande City, and is distinguished from a private residence only by a cross and a stained glass window at the entranceway.

“No Social Problems”

Lin quoted, with a shake of his head, a local priest as saying, “In my parish we have no social problems.”

The priests clearly believe the social problems of the Latin American farm workers in Starr County, as in the rest of the Valley and South Texas, are formidable.

The great majority of the families in Rio Grande City make less than the federal poverty level of $3,000 a year. Almost one-third of them make less than $1,000.

Most are U.S. citizens, but many speak only Spanish. Twenty-two percent are illiterate and the majority didn’t finish elementary school.

Many can get jobs only during harvest season when an adult can earn $6-7 dollars a day. As often as possible the entire family – adults and children – work together at piecework rates to increase the take-home pay.

One out of eight persons in the county migrates each year following the harvests and returns in the fall.

The union organized by Nelson, a Californian and outsider, and by several local men, got enthusiastic welcome from the laborers. Nelson says there are 1,300 members out of the county’s population of 17,000. None pays dues.

Nelson also said that the majority of the small merchants in Rio Grande City support the union.

The strike, which began June 1, is not stopping the harvesting of melons. A state court injunction prevents mass picketing which was effective for one day. But harvests of tomatoes, carrots, peppers, cotton, and cabbage are coming up.

The union would have died early and with it would have died any immediate spread of social protest across the rest of the Valley, had there been no outside financial help.

The condition of the farm laborers, hardly worse this year than for many years past, seems to have touched the feelings of people all over the state. Thousands of pounds of food and clothing are coming in from Catholic lay groups and even some Protestand ones.

The food and clothes are distributed to union families—105 late in June. It is probable that many of them have never before been as well fed and clothed. Certainly they never had as much canned meat.

When it became clear that the union had a fair chance of living, various organized labor groups in Texas began making cash contributions. Nelson had received a total of $2,300, he said late in June, and more since.

Priests’ Role

The priests are important to the union movement not only for the food that follows them but for the respectability they lend. The union members are almost entirely Catholic, or nominally Catholic and the presence of the priests reassures them that what they are doing is right.

The priests also serve to blunt growers’ charges that the Starr strike is led by “revolutionaries” or is “Communist-inspired.” It is hard to see Red through the white collars of the Catholic priests.

During a week at Rio Grande City, Link and Gist did more than lend dignity to the union.

They held masses for the strikers at night, and early one morning they went to the Rio Grande and tried to persuade workers being brought by bus from Mexico not to work on the farms being struck by the union.

La Casita Farms, one of the major growers against whom the strike is directed, was importing numbers of Mexicans legally able to enter the United States and work because they hold visas.

Link went around the windows of the bus, speaking to the Mexican workers. “I told them that brothers on both sides of the border should respect the strike. They sat silent.”

An Anglo-American who was direct the bus followed Link about playing a portable radio loudly. “I’ve got a surprise for him if he does that again,” Link said. After the bus went on to the fields, Link crossed the river and recorded a two-minute spot appeal to be broadcast by the local radio station.

Talk to Growers

In the afternoon, Link and Gist set out to try to talk to the growers, to see if a meeting between them and the strikers could be arranged.

With them went Margil Sanchez of Rio Grande City, one of the union leaders. A Car of newsmen followed them over the graveled, bumpy roads of Starr County.

The priests went from one large pleasant house to another in the Starr countryside without finding a grower at home. Finally they encountered Boone La Grange, formerly one of the major growers in Starr and now a partner in a dairy.

At the priests’ request for discussion, La Grange courteously invited them and the newsmen in to the small dairy office.

Father Gist spoke of “Christian justice for the farm hands and for all concerned.”

La Grange said, “That’s fair. Christian justice for all concerned. The same for the growers and the harvesters.” He said he was a Methodist himself.

When Link asked if he did not think the farm hands were entitled to more pay, La Grange said, “I think they’re entitled to more but the economy won’t allow it.”

La Grange said that the growers could pay more if they knew ahead of time what price they would get for their produce.

“The growers ought to be organized,” he said. They aren’t, and they face price competition.

California Pay

Gist said that California growers were paying $1.40 an hour. Why couldn’t the Starr growers do the same?

La Grange said the Starr growers could not compete with Florida and California growers in the quality of vegetables and could not get the same prices.

“Maybe this is a poverty area for growers and hands alike,” La Grange said. “I don’t think this area can support the people here. The workers don’t get their money from this area. They have to go to California and up north.”

La Grange said that he felt a meeting for bargaining wouldn’t be possible. He said the growers feel a basic distrust, “Everybody is against us.”

“Everybody has too closed a mind right now.”

The meeting broke up with nothing settled.

Besides the help of such priests as Link and Gist, the strikers are receiving somewhat belated but growing assistance from organized labor throughout the state and particularly in the Valley.

Labor leaders were playing surprised by the wide attention and support the strike received, but after the first days gifts of cash and promises of support came from labor groups over Texas.

One of the best organized organized valley unions, the Meat Cutters Local of the AFL-CIO, voted last week to support the strike with money. The international representative of the Meatcutters, Franklin Garcia of Corpus Christi, laid the prestige of his union on the line in bacing the Rio Grande City strike.

Boycotts Mentioned

The Meatcutters’ Local has 1,800 members who will be assessed regularly to support the strike, Garcia said. The strike will be aided with “everything we have,” Garcia said. He mentioned the possibility of boycotts against the products of Starr growers.

Garcia made it clear that he and his union looked on the Starr County situation as a strike against growers, not as a civil rights movement.

“If any guy thinks we’re in it for civil rights, he’s wrong. We’re a union,” Garcia said.

Later in the week Garcia said he was seeking leave from his union to help organize the Starr County group and possibly others. He has been a union organizer since 1950.

Many persons in the Valley believe that the key to Valley movement—whether civil rights, economic protest, or simply strike—is the new bishop of Brownsville, Most Rev. Humberto S. Medeiros. The great majority of the Valley’s residents are Catholic, and not by any means all uneducated farm workers.

Bishop Medeiros arrived in Brownsville only last week from Fall River, Mass., to be immediately confronted by a sharp debate among South Texas Catholic clergymen on the participation of priests in the Starr County movement.

Bishop Medeiros, 50, who immigrated to the United States from the Azores as a youth, so far has issued no statement clearly setting him on either side of the dispute, despite plain if unspoken invitations to do so.

Lucey’s View

At Bishop Medeiros’ installation last week in Brownsville, Archbishop Robert Lucey of San Antonio and Bishop Thomas Drury of Corpus Christi both made pointed statements that Vatican direction has been established for direct social action by the Catholic Church and priests.

Archbishop Lucey directly supported the strike and said that Valley growers were paying starvation wages.

Bishop Medeiros, who spoke only briefly, made no specific reference to the strike.

The bishop has been extremely active, however, in studying the problem of his new diocese. He has talked to growers and ranchers and AFL-CIO men. Diocesan officials have been kept up late getting information for him.

Last Friday, the bishop made an unpublicized visit to Rio Grande City and talked to pickets and growers there. The strike leader, Nelson, was not in Rio Grande City, but he visited the bishop in Brownsville Saturday.

The bishop sent a message to strikers Monday on the first day of their march to San Juan. The statement did not place the bishop squarely on either side. But it said that the bishop is not only concerned with the spiritual welfare of the people of in his diocese, he is totally committed to improving their material condition.

Read to Marchers

The message was read to the marchers by Father Bob Penn, who serves Sullivan City, La Joya and Los Ebanos in the Valley. Pena has been named the bishop’s coordinator in the strike area, and the bishop has given him $1,500 to use to help those whom the strike has affected.

The bishop plans to read mass at the Shrine of Our Lady of San Juan de los Lagos in San Juan at 6 p.m. Friday at the end of the march from Rio Grande City.

He will make a statement afterwards on what he believes to be the role of the church in social and economic issues and on what the policies of his diocese will be. Invitations have been issued to growers, farmers, ranchers, businessmen, members of the Knights of Columbus, and others. A considerable group is expected to attend, and the statement is awaited with great interest.

The shrine of Our Lady of San Juan of the Valley is venerated by Latin American Catholics all over the nation, and nowhere more than in the Rio Grande Valley. The words the bishop speaks there will have a great impact and a real effect on the social movement in the Valley.

SOURCE:

Ernest Morgan, “Priests Active in Strike,” San Antonio Express, July 7, 1966