Dolores Huerta Stands Strong

Dolores had spent a lifetime fighting for the rights of anyone treated unfairly–people who looked, acted, thought or felt differently from how others believed they should. Dolores had never done it for the recognition. She fought so that other people could live better lives because of the work that she helped to accomplish. And here she was, about to receive the 20012 Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor that the United States bestows.

When her turn came, President Obama introduced Dolores and listed some of her achievements. He recalled how in 1955 she had left her career as a schoolteacher without thought about how little she was about to earn. Back then, she was a single mother of seven. But she felt called upon to quit teaching in order to improve her students’ lives. She figured she could help her students more by organizing their poor farmworker families to fight for better living and working conditions than by trying to force those young, hungry, and exhausted students to learn.

Delores wanted community members to stand up for themselves. She decided that she would lead them, be their voice. She pushed the fruit and vegetable growers who hired farmworkers to pay those workers a fair wage, to treat them with respect, and to stop spraying the fields with pesticides while they worked.