I have your letter of June 1 [1974] and suggest that if you really want to know what is involved in organizing a Union, you should put some time into working to build one.” Mack Lyons seemed impatient, even dismissive. He had other things on his mind. As director of the United Farm Workers (UFW) Union in Florida, he had worked tirelessly for the last two-and-a-half years. Driving an aging 1968 Ford station wagon across the state, from swampy South Florida to the capital of Tallahassee, he gave countless speeches in churches, at local unions, and at political rallies; and, with his wife Diana Lyons and a small team of volunteers, planned, negotiated, and administered the first farmworkers’ collective bargaining agreement in Florida’s history. It was a contract between the Black, Mexican American, and white workers in Florida’s citrus groves and one of the most powerful companies in the world, Coca-Cola, which owned the Minute Maid groves and company houses where those workers lived and toiled.
Mack was responding to a letter that sat in the usual heap of correspondence that arrived daily at the Florida headquarters of the United Farm Workers. It was a well-meaning inquiry from a student at the historically Black Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University. The student wanted to know how, under Mack Lyons’s leadership, the California-based ufw had been able to win such an improbable contract. What were the main problems of organizing farmworkers? What could be done to replicate their unprecedented success across the state of Florida?
It was a chance for Mack to reflect on his time as an organizer and explain how an understaffed crew of volunteers from California and local grove workers had forged an interracial union within a multiracial political coalition in the 1970s U.S. South. The state was deeply hostile to labor unions, whose workers the Florida legislature described as “the most economically and socially deprived” in the nation. Even if Mack had the energy, neatly formulating abstract principles was not really his forte: “I cannot take the time from a very busy schedule to write for you a dissertation on what is required in building a union for farmworkers.” He was pragmatic, flexible, suspicious of theorizing. As Mack realized, it was hard to put into words. Conscious, day-to-day effort in the union and in the community created solidarity in practice, through methods that Mack and Diana Lyons deliberately and painstakingly cultivated in the UFW’s tumultuous first years in Florida’s citrus groves.