Activists gain post-election resolve from civil-rights veterans

Associated Press

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M.

It became clear to Javier Benavidez that Donald Trump would win the presidency around 2 a.m. after polls closed on Election Day. The Albuquerque activist had helped organize two anti-Trump protests in New Mexico and strongly opposed the Republican’s views on immigration.

He went to bed around 4 a.m. and expected to be depressed for days. Instead, Benavidez began thinking of the civil-rights leaders of the 1950s and 1960s and the hardships they faced, from police dogs and water hoses to assassinations and government spying.

If they could continue to fight in the climate of those times, he thought, today’s generation of liberal advocates could get through uneasiness over the election results.

“Honestly, I got energized,” Benavidez said. “It was like a religious experience.”

As Trump’s election sets in, some dispirited black and Latino liberal activists are looking to – and finding inspiration from – the veterans of civil-rights movements on how to respond to strong disappointment amid uncertainty over voting rights, immigration reform and police shootings.

They say they, too, felt hopeless at times, such as the 1968 assassination of Democratic presidential candidate Robert Kennedy and Richard Nixon’s election, but eventually, they kept fighting.

“We had no other choice,” said Dolores Huerta, who founded the United Farm Workers union with Cesar Chavez and was on stage with Kennedy – the brother of President John F. Kennedy – in Los Angeles before his assassination. “The only thing we can do is keep on organizing.”

Robert Kennedy’s death devastated Huerta. His presidential campaign platform sought to attack poverty and help minorities, she said. Eventually, she returned to activism.

Since Trump’s election, Huerta said, she’s been telling young, discouraged advocates that they still are needed for grassroots organizing. She reminds them of her own political disappointments in the 1960s that even saw the federal government spying on the advocacy group.

“But out of that chaos ... a lot of new organizations and movements were built,” Huerta said, pointing to the Chicano and gay-rights movements.