Famed labor activist Dolores Huerta received this year’s Robert O. Cooper Peace and Justice Fellowship Award from the SMU’s Chaplain’s Office on Sunday.
According to University Chaplain William Finnin, “We search for people who’ve been very public in their life and committed to values of social justice and progressive politics.”
The award was presented in conjunction with the Dallas Peace Center and Northaven United Methodist Church and was followed by the Robert O. Cooper Peace and Justice Fellowship Lecture, which Huerta gave.
According to Finnin, the award has three components. Recipients get a certificate honoring them and their contributions along with a $500 check from the Chaplain’s Office.
Recipients are also required to give a lecture on their experiences.
Administrative assistant Betty McHone helped research possible recipients for this year which, according to Finnin, was no small feat since candidates are scarce.
“There aren’t that many of them,” he said, ” but they’re there.”
But Huerta was “head and shoulders above the others we had looked at,” said Finnin.
Huerta’s experiences with activism date to the 1960s when she co-founded what would become the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez.
“I couldn’t stand seeing kids come to class hungry and needing shoes,” she said.
In 1965, the Delano Grape Strike eventually led the California table grape industry to sign a three-year collective bargaining agreement with the UFW that involved signing contracts for more than 10,000 workers.
The strike lasted for more than five years and used diplomatic channels and boycotts to bring about change.
Seven years later, Huerta co-chaired the California delegation to the Democratic Convention and lobbied for services for migrant and immigrant children.
She’s also fought for unemployment insurance, collective bargaining rights, and immigration rights for farm workers under the 1985 Rodino amnesty legalization program.
“It seemed in the struggle for workers’ rights, her name appears from the mid-60s on as the person who was constant in her advocacy for the poor,” said Finnin.
The Cooper Peace and Justice Fellowship began in 1993 in honor of former associate chaplain Robert Cooper, who was with SMU for 27 years.
The award was “a way to give expression to the kinds of progressive commitments he embodied” like peacemaking and equal rights, said Finnin.
Previous winners of the award include former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, a human rights lawyer; the Rev. William Sloane Coffin, a former Yale chaplain and civil rights activist; Sister Helen Prejean, an activist against the death penalty and author of “Dead Man Walking,” and SMU human rights professor and Amnesty International head Rick Halperin.
