Golden State Rebel

Ross grew up in a conservative middle-class family in Los Angeles and attended the University of Southern California (USC), a bastion of conformist frat-boy culture. He graduated in 1937, intending to become a schoolteacher. But the death of his friend and USC classmate Eugene Wolman, who was killed in Spain fighting Francisco Franco’s fascist army, and the social and economic upheavals of the Depression in the United States led Ross to seek more direct ways to challenge injustice.

After college, as American Agitators tells it, Ross organized Dust Bowlers and migrant farmworkers in California’s oppressive agricultural labor camps. In 1939, he became the manager of the US Department of Agriculture’s Migratory Labor Camp in Arvin, near Bakersfield. Of all twenty-nine camps in California, he was the only camp manager who challenged the accepted practice of racial segregation and agitated for the workers to run the camps themselves.

Ross helped the families organize a residents’ council, a newspaper, and a co-op store. Unlike the miserable camps run by the growers, the Arvin camp provided hot showers, free medical care, a library, and clean drinking water. Watching these desperate farmworker families practice self-government during his two years at Arvin strengthened Ross’s faith in the power of ordinary people to change their own lives.

While running the Arvin camp, Ross supported the efforts of farmworkers in the surrounding area to organize a union — a violation of federal rules, which mandated that administrators remain neutral. He permitted Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) union organizers in the camp and allowed pro-union articles to appear in the Tow Sack Tattler, the camp newspaper. He watched as local growers hired vigilantes to bust the strikers’ skulls while local police, sheriffs, and judges looked the other way — or, in some cases, participated in the violence. Ross saw firsthand the “rural civil war” that McWilliams described in his 1939 exposé, Factories in the Field.

At Arvin, Ross met folksinger Woody Guthrie, who was touring the camps to support workers’ union drives. John Steinbeck visited Arvin and used it as the model for the Weedpatch Camp in his novel The Grapes of Wrath. And Ross also escorted Eleanor Roosevelt around Bakersfield’s slums to show her that the appalling conditions described in Steinbeck’s fiction were not exaggerated.

California Organizer Patient Zero

During World War II, amid widespread anti-Japanese hysteria, the Roosevelt administration assigned Ross to run a large government-sponsored internment camp for Japanese Americans at Minidoka, Idaho. However, Ross quickly realized that the Roosevelt administration had been wrong to create this prison, so he moved to Cleveland to work with the War Relocation Authority on getting interned people jobs and housing so they could leave. “In Cleveland,” read his Los Angeles Times obituary in 1992, “he was credited with persuading defense plant owners to hire Japanese-Americans, who were then freed from the camps to work.” This was neither his first organizing drive to combat racial discrimination nor would it be his last.

After the war, Ross spearheaded eight Civic Unity Leagues in California’s conservative Citrus Belt. Through community organizing and voter registration drives, he brought Mexican Americans and African Americans together to battle segregation. In 1946, Ross’s organizing led to Mendez et al. v. Westminster School District, in which the US Court of Appeals ruled that the segregation of Mexican and Mexican American students into separate schools was unconstitutional. This landmark legal victory foreshadowed the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which overturned legal segregation in public schools.

In the 1950s, Ross worked in the Latino barrios in Arizona and California to build chapters of the Community Service Organization (CSO), a civil rights and civic improvement group. The founding leaders of the CSO chapter in Los Angeles included members of progressive unions, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Japanese American Citizens League, the Catholic Church, and the Jewish community. Together they fought for fair housing, employment, and better working conditions.

One of CSO’s biggest victories came in the wake of a severe beating of seven men, five of them Latinos, by Los Angeles cops on December 25, 1951. The attack, known as Bloody Christmas, left the victims with broken bones and ruptured organs. Pressure from CSO forced the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), which routinely harassed and abused blacks and Latinos, to investigate the incident.

CSO helped build the case against the abusive cops by documenting complaints and keeping up public pressure in the media. This eventually resulted in the unprecedented indictment of eight police officers — the first grand jury indictments of LAPD officers and the first criminal convictions for use of excessive force in the department’s history. Additionally, the LAPD suspended thirty-nine officers and transferred another fifty-four.

It was through his work with CSO that Ross encountered and trained many of the people who went on to play important roles in American political and civic life. In 1949, after building a powerful voter registration effort among Latinos and whites, CSO helped elect one of its leaders, Ed Roybal, to the Los Angeles City Council, the first Latino elected to that body. In 1962, Roybal was the first Hispanic from California elected to Congress, where he served with distinction for thirty years.

In 1952, while Ross was building the CSO chapter in San Jose, a public health nurse told him about Cesar Chavez, a young Navy veteran who lived with his wife in a barrio called Sal Si Puedes ( “Get Out If You Can”). Chavez was wary of Ross in the beginning, thinking he was just another white social worker or sociologist curious about barrio residents’ exotic habits. But he finally agreed to meet with Ross, and he quickly gained respect for the latter’s commitment and talents.

Ross and Chavez became close friends. “The first practical steps I learned were from the best organizer I know: Fred Ross Sr,” Cesar Chavez is quoted as saying in American Agitators. “He changed my life.”

Chavez became a CSO organizer and eventually the group’s statewide director. Ross also trained a young teacher named Dolores Huerta and Gilbert Padilla, a spotter in a dry-cleaning establishment, as CSO activists. In the 1960s, Chavez, Huerta, and Padilla went on to build the United Farm Workers union.

Portrait in Perseverance

During his fifteen-year tenure with the UFW, Ross trained some two thousand organizers who led worker strikes and consumer boycotts in major US and Canadian cities, leading to significant gains for farmworkers.

For more than five decades, Ross helped build the labor movement and built bridges between labor, religious, civic, and neighborhood organizations. Many of Ross’s strategic innovations — including house meetings to recruit people into grassroots activism and voter registration and turnout efforts among infrequent voters — have become standard practice among organizers.

Decades before the feminist movement of the 1970s, Ross was a pioneer in recruiting and training women as leaders of grassroots organizations. Half a century before Black Lives Matter, he organized campaigns against police brutality and racism. Though he himself was white and middle-class, he helped catalyze the upsurge of political activism within working-class Latino communities that has reshaped American politics.

In the summer of 1964, Ross brought his sixteen-year-old son, Fred Ross Jr, with him to Guadalupe, an unincorporated community in Arizona, home to Yaqui Indians 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. The younger watched as his father knocked on doors, listened to people’s concerns, held meetings, and led voter registration drives. Soon, an organization was created. A year later, the group 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. . . . Someone once said that an organizer is part missionary, part educator, part agitator. My dad had all three of those qualities.”

After graduating from college in 1970, Fred Jr joined the UFW and spearheaded farmworker campaigns in Oregon, Washington, and California — launching a storied organizing career of his own with community groups, unions, and liberal politicians. In the 1980s, Fred Jr founded Neighbor to Neighbor to mobilize opposition to Reagan-era support for reactionaries in Nicaragua and El Salvador. The group launched a boycott of Salvadoran coffee to protest the human rights abuses of the right-wing government and persuaded the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union to refuse to unload Salvadoran coffee beans on the West Coast.

American Agitators was Fred Jr’s brainchild, but he died of cancer in November 2022 before the project was finished. Telles intersperses clips and interviews about Fred Jr’s own organizing alongside his father’s, making the film an intergenerational tribute.

At a time of profound political cynicism and justified horror, American Agitators offers a hopeful message that strategic collective action can win against difficult odds. The viewer leaves inspired, a rare experience in Donald Trump’s America. If there’s one lesson we can take from Ross’s life, it’s the value of political perseverance.

As Ross himself put it, “Good organizers never give up — they get the opposition to do that.”