Can I Get a Witness?

Thirteen Peacemakers, Community-Builders, and Agitators for Faith and Justice

Charles Marsh, Shea Tuttle, Daniel P. Rhodes, Charles Marsh, Shea Tuttle, Daniel P. Rhodes

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780802875730
• eBook ISBN: 9781467452632
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

How do we transform American Culture through our religious convictions?

Discover here the compelling storiesof thirteen pioneers for social justice who engaged in peaceful protest and gave voice to the marginalized, working courageously out of their religious convictions to transform American culture. Their prophetic witness still speaks today.

Comprising a variety of voices—Catholic and Protestant, gay and straight, men and women of different racial backgrounds—these activist witnesses represent the best of the church's peacemakers, community builders, and inside agitators. Written by select authors, Can I Get a Witness? showcases vibrant storytelling and research-enriched narrative to bring these significant "peculiar people" to life.

CONTRIBUTORS & SUBJECTS:

Daniel P. Rhodes on Cesar Chavez
Donyelle McCray on Howard Thurman
Grace Y. Kao on Yuri Kochiyama
Peter Slade on Howard Kester
Nichole M. Flores on Ella Baker
Carlene Bauer on Dorothy Day
Heather A. Warren on John A. Ryan
Becca Stevens on William Stringfellow
W. Ralph Eubanks on Mahalia Jackson
Susan M. Glisson and Charles H. Tucker on Lucy Randolph Mason
Soong-Chan Rah on Richard Twiss
David Dark on Daniel Berrigan
M. Therese Lysaught on Mary Stella Simpson

Notes

1.Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (New York: Touchstone, 1971), 275.

2.Christopher Rowland, Radical Christianity: A Reading of Recovery (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2004), 161.

3.“St. Mathetes Epistle to Diognetus,” Apostolic Fathers (London: Lightfoot & Harmer, 1891).

4.Albert J. Raboteau, “American Salvation: The Place of Christianity in Public Life,” Boston Review, April/May 2005.

5.Thomas Merton, “Events and Pseudo-Events: Letter to a Southern Churchman” in The Failure and the Hope: Essays of Southern Churchmen, ed. Will D. Campbell and James Y. Holloway (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 1972), 91. Merton’s essay first appeared, in slightly different form, in Katallagete—Be Reconciled, the journal of the Committee of Southern Churchmen, in 1966.

CESAR CHAVEZ

1.Peter Matthiessen, Sal Si Puedes: Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (New York: Random House, 1969), 6.

2.Jacques E. Levy, Cesar Chavez: Autobiography of La Causa (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1975), 37.

3.Quoted in Matthiessen, Sal Si Puedes, 148.

4.Fred Ross, Conquering Goliath: Cesar Chavez at the Beginning (Keene, CA: El Taller Grafico Press, 1989), 143.

5.Miriam Pawel, The Crusades of Cesar Chavez: A Biography (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2014), 7.

6.Pawel, Crusades of Cesar Chavez, 8–9.

7.Levy, Cesar Chavez, 17.

8.Richard Griswold del Castillo and Richard A. Garcia, César Chávez: A Triumph of Spirit (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995), 7.

9.Ronald B. Taylor, Chavez and the Farmworkers (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1975), 61.

10.Levy, Cesar Chavez, 26.

11.Levy, Cesar Chavez, 25.

12.Levy, Cesar Chavez, 18–19.

13.Levy, Cesar Chavez, 27.

14.Frederick John Dalton, The Moral Vision of César Chavez (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003), 40–41.

15.Levy, Cesar Chavez, 66.

16.Pawel, Crusades of Cesar Chavez, 16.

17.Levy, Cesar Chavez, 74.

18.Cesar Chavez, An Organizer’s Tale: Speeches, ed. Ilan Stavans (New York: Penguin, 2008), 25.

19.Pawel, Crusades of Cesar Chavez, 467.

20.Pawel, Crusades of Cesar Chavez, 93.

21.Levy, Cesar Chavez, 99.

22.Chavez, Organizer’s Tale, 17.

23.Levy, Cesar Chavez, 4.

24.Levy, Cesar Chavez, 3.

25.Castillo and Garcia, César Chávez, 34–35.

26.Matthiessen, Sal Si Puedes, 58, 87.

27.Levy, Cesar Chavez, 42.

28.Chavez, Organizer’s Tale, 14. Originally coauthored by Cesar, Helen, and Luis Valdez, the “Plan of Delano” was first published in the union’s newspaper, El Malcriado, on March 17, 1966.

29.Miriam Pawel, The Union of Their Dreams: Power, Hope, and Struggle in Cesar Chavez’s Farm Worker Movement (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2009), 10.

30.For instance, Mark Day reports that a Bank of America subsidiary, the California Land Company of Visalia, began absorbing smaller farms in the 1930s until they controlled 90 percent of the ranches around the San Joaquin Valley town of Delano (Mark Day, Forty Acres: Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers [New York: Praeger, 1971], 27). Similarly, Ronald Taylor notes that other titans such as Wells Fargo, the United Fruit Company, J. G. Boswell Co., Purex, and Tenneco were key players in the industry. The Tenneco conglomerate alone held 1.4 million acres in California and Arizona, a true industry behemoth (Taylor, Chavez, 39).

31.An account of the history and development of agribusiness in California with special attention to its impact on workers can be found in Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field: The Story of Migratory Farm Labor in California (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1939; repr., Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1969).

32.Taylor, Chavez, 38–39.

33.Castillo and Garcia, César Chávez, 28–29.

34.Pawel, Union of Their Dreams, 10.

35.Pawel, Union of Their Dreams, 15.

36.Castillo and Garcia, César Chávez, 36.

37.Levy, Cesar Chavez, 175.

38.Castillo and Garcia, César Chávez, 38.

39.Pawel, Crusades of Cesar Chavez, 101.

40.Pawel, Crusades of Cesar Chavez, 101.

41.Pawel, Crusades of Cesar Chavez, 105.

42.Levy, Cesar Chavez, 184.

43.Castillo and Garcia, César Chávez, 42–44.

44.Pawel, Crusades of Cesar Chavez, 106.

45.Mattheissen, Sal Si Puedes, 137.

46.Levy, Cesar Chavez, xxiii.

47.French philosopher and former Jesuit Michel de Certeau argued that the strong enjoy a certain geographical advantage, deploying strategies of domination based on their superior vantage point and thus on their ability to dictate the structure of the spatial dimension of relations. The weak, by contrast, he theorized, make use of more ad hoc tactics that play on time in order to resist domination. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 34–39.

48.El Malcriado, no. 21 (1965), 10–11.

49.El Malcriado, no. 23 (1965), 3.

50.El Malcriado, no. 23 (1965), 5.

51.Dalton, Moral Vision, 86.

52.de Certeau, Practice of Everyday...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Cesar Chavez
• Howard Thurman
• Yuri Kochiyama
• Howard Kester
• Ella Baker
• Dorothy Day
• John A. Ryan
• Frank William Stringfellow
• Mahalia Jackson
• Lucy Randolph Mason
• Richard Twiss
• Daniel Berrigan
• Mary Stella Simpson
• Further Reading
• Contributors
• Notes
• Index