Cesar Chavez was a Mexican-American labor leader and civil rights activist that was striving for better working and living conditions for farmers.Committed to the tactics of nonviolent resistance practiced by Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., Chavez founded the National Farm Workers Association (later the United Farm Workers of America) and won important victories to raise pay and improve working conditions for farm workers in the late 1960s and 1970s.
In 1952, Chavez was working at a lumberyard in San Jose when he became a grassroots organizer for the Community Service Organization (CSO), a Latino civil rights group. Over the next decade, he worked to register new voters and fight racial and economic discrimination, and rose to become the CSO's national director. Chavez resigned from the CSO in 1962, after other members refused to support his efforts to form a labor union for farm workers. That same year, he used his life savings to found the National Farm Workers Association (NFWA) in Delano, California.