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The story of Cesar Chavez is a tragedy.
Not because his legacy as a union leader is forever tarnished by his alleged abuse and rape of women and underage girls over several decades.
Rather, it is a tragedy that not one of his victims believed she could come forward until now.
Some of those molested and assaulted by Chavez were too frightened to speak out. Others worried that they would not be believed, or that they would be humiliated, or blamed. And others feared that telling the truth about Chavez would hurt the political movement he led.
They watched as he was turned into a hero, cast literally in bronze, celebrated by presidents, commemorated in state holidays, even honored by a U.S. Navy vessel that bears his name.
Many children’s books feature the man. “Who Was Cesar Chavez?” one book is called.
Who, indeed?
Here’s the latest on the Cesar Chavez investigation fallout
Dolores Huerta knew. The venerated civil rights activist, whose name is still invoked in our politics today, was prepared to go to her grave without revealing what Chavez had done to her.
He pressured her into sex in 1960, then brutally raped her in 1966, leaving her pregnant on both occasions.
She admitted Wednesday that she had “kept a secret because I believed that exposing the truth would hurt the farmworker movement I have spent my entire life fighting for.”
And that is the tragedy. She accepted the moral burden of silence for the sake of the cause.
We cannot judge her — a victim of the most cruel and intimate form of violence. But we can ask how widely Chavez’s behavior was known within the labor movement.
The United Farm Workers (UFW) did not hesitate to abandon Chavez — one of its co-founders — when the news of the allegations was imminent on Tuesday. It did not wait for the facts to come out; it did not wait for a public debate; it did not wait to allow its members to weigh in.
That swift action, while commendable, also suggests that the truth about Chavez was already well-known inside the movement he had led.
And yet Cesar Chavez was embraced by governors and presidents. Barack Obama borrowed his slogan. Joe Biden kept a bust of Chavez in the Oval Office. Gavin Newsom said that his home was filled with photographs of Chavez. He said he was struggling to understand the news.
One explanation is that Chavez is no longer a useful hero. He opposed illegal immigration, a point conservatives have made often as they defend Donald Trump’s tough border policies.
In theory, the purpose of a union is to stand up for the most vulnerable among us. But no one defended the women and girls Chavez assaulted. They had to suffer for a supposedly higher purpose.
It is a curious form of morality that judges right and wrong solely by their political convenience.
It is right that Chavez’s name is removed from buildings and public institutions. But there is a wider circle of guilt within a labor movement that suppressed the truth.