“A good organizer is a social arsonist,” Fred Ross Sr once said. “One who goes around setting people on fire.”
Ross may be the most influential political activist you’ve never heard of. This anonymity was intentional. Carey McWilliams of the Nation called Ross “a man of exasperating modesty, the kind that never steps forward to claim his fair share of credit for any enterprise in which he is involved.” He believed organizers should be behind the scenes, getting others to take leadership in their unions, community organizations, and civil rights groups.
Ross was a California community organizer for the better part of the twentieth century. He started in the 1930s farmworker camps that inspired John Steinbeck’s novels and went on to pioneer methodical tactics that transformed American organizing.
A new documentary film, American Agitators, seeks to bring Ross out of history’s shadows. It features interviews with more than a dozen people he trained and inspired, including Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez, and long-hidden video clips and photos of the people and movements he helped catalyze. Filmmaker Ray Telles, whose previous films include the Emmy Award–winning The Fight in the Fields about the United Farm Workers (UFW), directed the film. It’s narrated by Luis Valdez, a screenwriter and director (Zoot Suit, La Bamba) who started his career as the pioneering founder of the UFW’s El Teatro Campesino, or workers’ theater.
Ross believed that successful movements win by waging issue-oriented campaigns and building stable organizations run by grassroots leaders. In his view, protests and rallies were tactics in building power, not ends in themselves or mere media spectacles. Ross was quiet, earnest, and a stickler for detail. He developed deliberate and systematic techniques for recruiting and mobilizing workers, voters, and community residents — ones that would allow organizers to evaluate the success or failure of their efforts: “90% of organizing is follow up,” he wrote in his handbook, Axioms for Organizers.
Eliseo Medina, whom Ross trained as a young farmworker and who later became an influential leader with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), explains Ross’s characteristic organizing style. In American Agitators, Medina recounts Ross’s emphasis on house meetings, one-on-one contacts, careful listening, and giving people responsibilities to expand their self-confidence as leaders.
Organizers have passed these strategies down over generations, and American Agitators profiles contemporary organizing campaigns that employ the very methods Ross pioneered. The film follows the efforts of the Fight for $15 movement of fast-food workers seeking to unionize and raise the minimum wage; environmental justice struggles in rural California; teachers, families, and community members who forged a coalition to win a fair contract with the Oakland school district; and campaigns by hotel and casino workers in Las Vegas to win better wages and working conditions and to elect allies to political office.