1. Delano grape strike (1965)

Mexican American farmworkers, tired of exploitation and inhumane treatment, demanded living wages, education for their children and decent housing. The life expectancy of these farmworkers was only 49 years, thanks to pesticide poisoning. Despite the miserable conditions persisting for decades, unionizing efforts often failed because workers were easily replaceable. But when a Filipino farmworker labor organization began striking, Mexican farmworkers joined them, taking advantage of the end of the Bracero program, which brought cheap, replaceable labor for growers. Together, they formed a larger labor organization; strikes were initially ineffective until the organization organized effective boycotts to put pressure on the growers.

2. Black Panther Party for Self-Defense (1966)

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An often-neglected Black power organization in American civil rights curriculums, the Black Panthers faced ruthless state surveillance and infiltration. The party fought for more than formal citizenship rights and wanted Black people to earn political and economic power. Unfortunately, the party has been associated with extremism and violence, overshadowing its community programs, political education and self-defense initiatives. The party started a free breakfast program in public schools in 1969 that forced governments to address the needs of low-income children. The FBI essentially dissolved the Black Panthers by targeting its leaders one by one, creating divisiveness in the party that harmed its political potency.

3. LGBTQ movement

Though Stonewall, considered to be the birth of gay power, was in 1969, it was not until the AIDS crisis began in 1981 that the problems of homophobia and heterosexism in America were elevated to the public consciousness. Prejudice was always life or death for gay people, but now it was more visible, thanks to bureaucracies’ neglect of the major public health panic. Gay people jumped out of closets to help organize the movement and to make art in support of those dying. The epidemic raged, killing 35 million people, but the crisis galvanized the gay rights movement, facilitating greater organization and intersectionality. 

4. Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (1960)

While the Civil Rights Movement is remembered through its most iconic leaders, students also had a considerable impact through organizing protests like sit-ins. Emerging from North Carolina and Tennessee sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, the committee challenged the exclusion of Black people from American life. It helped organize Freedom Rides in 1961, taking mixed-race groups to travel on interstate buses in the South. They faced brutal violence from KKK members as police watched, essentially forcing the federal government to intervene and desegregate interstate buses. They also organized voter registration drives like the Mississippi Freedom Project, which saw 1,000 activists arrested and dozens beaten.

5. Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union (1934)

Founded in eastern rural Arkansas, this union was racially integrated, and women were essential to its organization. Its leaders believed both Black and white farmers had reason to organize together because of their shared economic conditions. Formed during the Great Depression, tenant farmers and sharecroppers fought for New Deal subsidies provided to landowners to be distributed between both landowners and tenant farmers. Instead of distributing the subsidies, planters often kept the money, evicting farmers and leaving them homeless. Union activists protested these evictions, persisting despite violence from plantation owners, threats of lynching from locals and the jailing of leader Ward Rodgers.