http://billmoyers.com/segment/baldemar-velasquez-on-fighting-for-farmworkers/
And you watch the condescension. Well, that's the way my grandparents
were treated. That's the way my aunts were treated. And that was in
the heyday of the Civil Rights Movement. The folk singers were singing
protest songs. I learned and gleaned everything that I was hearing.
And so I went to volunteer for CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality
in Cleveland, Ohio.
And I lived in a tenement house with an African American family. And
my job was to ride shotgun with another man with a police scanner in
the car. And our job was to respond to police calls and document
police brutality cases in the black neighborhoods. Well, I go home
every night to that tenement house. And I'd sleep on this guy's couch.
Well, one morning he asked me, "Son, I've got to ask you a question."
I say, "Yeah, go head." He says, "Well, you're the only person I've
ever had here as a volunteer that hasn't complained about the rats.
Why is that?" So I told him my rat story, that I grew up with the rats
in labor camps and the old farmhouse we lived on the county line in
Northwest Ohio. There was the couch that in the living room was my bed
and my brother's bed. He slept on one end. And I slept on the other
end. And there was, that couch was pushed up against a window
overlooking the front porch. And there was a crack underneath the
pane. And that's where the rats would come in at night.
So at night, you'd hear the scratching along the back of that couch.
And we knew there was a rat going to get up on the top up there. And
we knew that the rat had to jump on the seat where we sleeping before
he got on the floor. So when we'd hear the scratching on the back of
that couch, we'd kick each other and pull the blanket taut. To make
kind of like a trampoline for the rat.
And the rat would jump down on the blanket. And when we'd hear that,
we'd go with our fists underneath, boom, like that, to see how far we
could make the rat fly. And that was our game, to see how far we could
make the rat fly.
But the man says, he looked kind of stunned, and he said, "Good Lord,
son, why aren't you doing something for your own people?" And that's
what provoked the thought, "I need to go back and start organizing the
migrant workers and try to follow the lessons of the Civil Rights
Movement to speak for people and organize them so they can speak for
themselves."
' Better to die on your feet than to live on your knees ' - great
quote found later on in the article