Protecting a Hero Too Long
Dolores Huerta is smiling in the photo, wearing a trim teal-blue suit, her hair still black at 82, as President Obama places the 2012 Presidential Medal of Freedom around her neck. It was a moment that brought the best of American culture together in one room: an astronaut, a lyricist, a Nobel Prize–winning writer, the first female secretary of state, and Huerta—the labor activist who founded the United Farm Workers alongside Cesar Chavez.
Looking at that photo now, I wonder about the weight of the secret she was carrying, and whether it took anything away from her pride in what the two of them had built.
Last week, The New York Times revealed that Chavez had allegedly abused two underaged girls. Those girls, now 66 years old—Ana Murguia and Debra Rojas—told their stories to the Times. Rojas says that Chavez, who died in 1993, touched her breasts when she was only 12 and that three years afterward, while she was on the 1,000 Mile March with him in California, he arranged for her to stay at a motel where he raped her. At the same time as the article was published, Huerta issued a short but cutting statement, in Spanish and English, saying that Chavez had abused her as well: once pressuring her into sex, and once forcing her. Both episodes, she said, had resulted in pregnancies. “I am nearly 96 years old,” she wrote, “and for the last 60 years have kept a secret because I believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement I have spent my entire life fighting for.”
I felt angry reading about Murguia’s and Rojas’s experiences. But it’s Huerta’s silence that has lingered with me. As a Black woman, I recognize the pressure to protect the reputation of Black men, even our flawed ones—to shield Black men who have been unfairly targeted by society, even, at times, when they’ve done things that are wrong. Women have been abused, and people have refused to talk about that abuse, in every racial group, in every time in history, of course. But the pressure to cover for perpetrators can be especially heavy in communities of color. I know from talking with friends and family that many of us share this harmful, confusing urge.
In 2015, the cover of New York magazine featured 35 women who had accused Bill Cosby of sexual assault. I was shocked; growing up, Cosby was the man I pictured when I imagined the father I wished I had. After Cosby was convicted of sexual assault in 2018, his wife, Camille, defended him. “Since when are all accusers truthful?” she asked. She couldn’t possibly believe that all 35 women were lying, could she? But she used a damning example from American history to discredit the women: “Emmett Till’s accuser immediately comes to mind. In 1955, she testified before a jury of white men in a Mississippi courtroom that a 14-year-old African American boy had sexually assaulted her, only to later admit several decades later in 2008 that her testimony was false.” (Cosby’s conviction was overturned for procedural reasons in 2021, though this week a civil jury found that he had drugged and assaulted a former waitress, and ordered him to pay her more than $59 million in damages.) Women have been vilified for accusing successful Black men—Sean Combs, Russell Simmons, R. Kelly—of abuse: Why do they want to tarnish a Black man’s legacy?
When I learned about assault within my own family’s history, an older relative pushed me to ignore it—she was determined to protect her dead husband’s memory over her own daughter’s truth. And when I uncovered a police report revealing that I may have been abused as a child by that same man, some of the older women in my life tried to talk me out of writing about it. They sympathized with me, but they didn’t understand why I needed to.
Huerta told her story because of what the Times’ investigation revealed. Huerta and Chavez co-founded the United Farm Workers union in the ’60s. In 1965, she joined Chavez in leading a global grape boycott that pressured growers into granting some of America’s first farm-worker contracts. When she started working with Chavez, she was a mother of seven with little experience in political negotiating. She would go on to have six more children, including the two he fathered, whom she gave to other families to raise—and who only recently learned the truth. Over the decades, schools and streets have been named for Chavez; biographies have been written. The year after he died, Bill Clinton awarded him with a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom—almost 20 years before Huerta received the same award.
After I read about Huerta’s story last week, I needed to talk to someone about it. On my walk to work, I called a mentor of mine, an older Black woman, to get her thoughts. “Why is she coming out with it now?” she wanted to know. “This happened back in the ’70s.” I could picture her shaking her head. “Men have always been crude,” she said flippantly.
My mentor is 83. I wondered if her rationale for thinking that bad things should stay in the past has to do with the fact that she’s part of the Silent Generation, famous for their willingness to sacrifice. Huerta, too, belongs to the Silent Generation. But she’s never stopped speaking up for other people. On January 9, in Bakersfield, California, she stood in the cold in a knit hat and black coat, holding a sign that read Rest in Peace Renee Nicole Good[1.1], honoring the life of a woman who was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.
She wrote in her statement that she had finally come forward because Murguia’s and Rojas’s stories made her realize that “I was not the only one.” I wonder if she shared her deepest secret to add legitimacy to their claims. This wasn’t the first time that Rojas had tried to share her story. Years ago, she wrote—and days later (in a move now heartbreaking to contemplate) deleted––a post in a private Facebook group in which she said that Chavez had molested her. Perhaps she felt that no one would listen to her then.
Many of us understand the desire to protect a movement that seeks justice. But protecting men who hurt women isn’t the way to do it. “The farmworker movement has always been bigger and far more important than any one individual,” Huerta wrote. In the end, she must have seen that speaking out was not a threat to what her community built, but the only way to purify it.