It was the summer of 1964, and Fred Ross Jr. was a 16-year-old who had tagged along with his father to Guadalupe, an unincorporated community in Arizona, home to Yaqui and Mexican Americans. The village had long been ignored by elected officials and lacked the most basic of services, with no streetlights, sewers or paved roads. Fred Ross Sr. was there to organize residents into a political force as he had already done throughout California. Although Fred Jr.’s father would become a legendary figure in the field of community and labor organizing — known above all for recruiting and training Cesar Chavez — at the time Fred Jr., his youngest son, had only a vague notion of how his father spent his days.
“I knew he was helping poor people,” Fred Ross Jr. recalled several years ago. During the summer of 1964, he saw his father knock on doors, listen to concerns, hold meetings and lead voter registration drives. Soon an organization was created; a year later, the group had secured funding to launch a credit union, open a dental clinic and train community health workers. “I watched as people who were once shy now peppered politicians with questions,” Fred Jr. recalled about that summer. “That is when it crystallized how significant this work was.”
It was a formative few months for Fred Ross Jr., who died at his home in Berkeley, California, on Nov. 20 at the age of 75 from pancreatic cancer. A lifelong organizer, Fred Ross Jr.’s career spanned multiple unions — the United Farm Workers, the Service Employee International Union and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers — and included a stint challenging U.S. support for murderous Central American regimes during the 1980s. Along with his organizing, he championed the groundbreaking work and legacy of his father, two parallel goals he pursued with characteristic enthusiasm and dedication.
Fred Ross Jr. was a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, and followed his father into the UFW, joining the union in 1970, when he organized workers in the fields and consumers on the boycott line. It was heady, sometimes treacherous work: An agricultural grower once knocked him unconscious, and a supermarket security guard fired a bullet at him. In 1975, he proposed and helped organize a 110-mile march from San Francisco to the E. & J. Gallo Winery, which the union was boycotting in a protest that attracted 10,000 farmworkers and supporters and helped reinvigorate the union.
“He was one of the most focused, disciplined, dogged but humble organizers I ever worked with,” said Arturo Rodriguez, former president of the UFW. “When he got on a campaign, he was thinking about that campaign day and night.”
After leaving the UFW in 1976, Ross graduated from the University of San Francisco School of Law and became a public defender, then moved into electoral politics. He helped defeat the recall of San Francisco Mayor Dianne Feinstein in 1983 and ran the get-out-the-vote operation for Nancy Pelosi’s first congressional run in 1987, where she eked out a close victory in a special election primary. “Without his early support and brilliant leadership organizing the ground operation of my first campaign, I would have never become a Member of Congress,” Pelosi said in a statement.
In the 1980s, Ross also led Neighbor to Neighbor, which challenged U.S. foreign policy in Central America and generated pressure that helped end U.S. support for the Contras in Nicaragua. The group also borrowed a page from the UFW, launching a boycott of Salvadoran coffee to protest the human rights abuses of the right-wing government. In 1989, while visiting El Salvador to plan the boycott, Ross and his delegation held clandestine meetings and were once rushed to the home of a supporter to prevent the military from arresting them. When the boycott was launched, members of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, headed by President Jimmy Herman, a longtime supporter of the UFW, refused to unload Salvadoran beans on the West Coast.
After organizing hospital workers at SEIU, Ross joined IBEW Local 1245 in 2009, which was headed by Tom Dalzell, a former lawyer with the UFW. Ross had his work cut out for him. “He didn’t come into a small, sputtering organizing department,” Dalzell said. “He came into a nonexistent one, and he just built it.” With his longtime organizing partner, Eileen Purcell, Ross developed a robust training program that transformed union stewards into field organizers, sending activists across the country to help in political races and to fight anti-union proposals.
“What they did was so far beyond the scope of anything I would have thought of,” Dalzell said. “As an organizer, he always put the workers out front, and they became the leaders.” (One of the first “organizing stewards” trained by Ross was Jammi Juarez, who was then working at a Pacific Gas and Electric Co. call center. She is now the organizing director for IBEW’s international union).
Ross retired from IBEW 1245 in January, intending to spend more time on another of his life’s great projects: sharing and celebrating the legacy of his father. I first met Ross in 2009 while working on a biography of his dad, a pioneering organizer who collaborated with Saul Alinksy, mentored Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, and developed key organizing tactics still used today, such as the house meeting. Over the years that I researched and wrote the book, Ross Jr. shared countless stories about his father and his mother, Frances Ross, also an activist who contracted polio shortly before Ross’ birth but recovered to establish a successful career in the field of mental health.
Ross was immensely proud of his father and led an unsuccessful campaign to have him receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously. In 2014, the momentum from the campaign helped pave the way for his father to be inducted into the California Hall of Fame, joining such luminaries as Jackie Robinson, John Steinbeck and his former students, Chavez and Huerta. Ross saw his effort to secure public recognition for his father as a way to lift up the role of organizers in general and to highlight the dogged work that goes on every day, often against great odds and almost always far from the spotlight.
Two weeks after retiring from IBEW, Ross Jr. was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. At the time, he was raising funds for a forthcoming documentary about his father’s organizing legacy, to be directed by Ray Telles, who co-directed the documentary The Fight in the Fields: Cesar Chavez and the Farmworkers’ Struggle. Despite the diagnosis, Ross didn’t seem to slow down, continuing to raise funds and host meetings to support the film about his father while finding support in his wife, longtime labor attorney Margo Feinberg, and his two children, Charley and Helen Ross.
Like his father, Ross had an uncommon optimism and a superhuman work ethic. Recently, Arturo Rodriquez called Ross to tell him that he had secured additional funding for the documentary. “I later heard from Margo that he had reached out to other people to share the good news,” Rodriguez said. “Three days before he passed away, and he’s still out there encouraging everybody to keep on going. He truly embodied Si Se Puede.”
Ross is survived by his wife, Margo Feinberg; two children, Charley Ross and Helen Ross; brother, Robert Ross; and sister, Julia Ross. In his memory, the family asks that contributions be made to the Fred Ross Sr. documentary project via fredrossproject.org. Condolences and memories sent to FredrossMemories@gmail.com will be shared with his family.
