By Ben Jealous
When I was a boy, Martin Luther King Jr. was in our history books. Dolores Huerta was in the fields of our county.
She and the United Farm Workers were organizing the people who picked our food. Our family stood with them. I cannot remember eating grapes or strawberries for much of my childhood. Boycotts were how we helped the farmworkers fight for fair wages and the dignity they deserved. Dolores was one of my heroes long before I met her.
Later, as I found my way into leadership in the civil rights movement, I came to know her personally. We marched, organized and campaigned together. I learned she was even more remarkable up close. A few years ago, I was walking past the U.S. Capitol when I almost missed her.
Dozens of teenagers and college students from Texas were sitting together on the cement steps. In the middle of them was Dolores, 92 years old, sitting just like everybody else. No special chair. No fuss. You would have thought she was another student.
I called out to her, smiling. We caught up.
There was one thing I knew better than to do. I did not ask how she managed to look so young. I had made that mistake before.
We were campaigning together. She was 91. For nearly two weeks she had been putting in 12-hour days, traveling, talking to voters, and rising the next morning to do it all again.
Over breakfast I asked her how she did it. She looked at me and said, “It’s easy, Ben. You just live every day like you did the day before, and you never stop.” That was it. No secret. No lecture. Just keep going.
A friend told me he had seen Dolores dancing with the rapper Common at two in the morning. I believed him. Of course I did. The last time I saw her, Dolores was 94. I was hosting Dr. Jane Goodall at an event celebrating Jane’s 91st birthday.
Jane asked the room if anybody there was older than she was. It was clearly supposed to be a rhetorical question.
Dolores answered that she was.
For a moment, Jane looked stunned. Then she gathered herself and took back command of the room. I had to laugh. Dolores had surprised one of the most extraordinary women alive just by being herself. Once, over another meal, Dolores told me how far back her family went in New Mexico.
More than a dozen generations, as I remember it. I asked for the stories.
Well, there were plenty. One ancestor, she said, may have ridden with Geronimo’s band. Another was kidnapped by members of the band as a child, only to escape into a town crying, “Soy una cristiana!” Another had a wagon break down on the way west. Another was a circuit-riding pastor.
By the time she finished, I was pretty sure she had covered every character in every Western movie I had ever seen.
I remember thinking: No wonder she is so tough. No wonder she is so brave. Courage had been passed down in her family for generations, along with stories of surviving hard times.
That was also what Dolores spent her life doing for the rest of us. She helped build the farmworkers’ movement and carried its lessons to each new generation. She fought for workers, for immigrants, for women, for the right to vote. “Sí, se puede” was not just something she said. It was how she lived.
When Dolores died at 96, I thought again about those young Texans on the Capitol steps. They were sitting beside someone who had helped change their grandparents’ world. And she was sitting among them like she belonged there. She did.
Dolores understood something that every movement must learn. You do not hand the work to the next generation from a distance. You sit with them. You listen. You show up.
I will miss her laughter, her stories, and the wonderful surprise of finding her wherever people were organizing. But I will keep hearing her voice over breakfast. You live every day like you did the day before. And you never stop.
Now it is our turn.
