Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
count in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
The Grapes of Wrath
. The topic was widely
banned, while the 1940 movie version, its star Henry Fonda and Steinbeck himself were
accused of harboring communist sympathies. Even so, the public support it won for farm
workers set the stage later for launching the United Farm Workers union.
California's workforce permanently changed during WWII, when women and African
Americans were recruited for wartime industries and Mexican workers were brought in to
fill labor shortages. Contracts in military communications and aviation attracted an inter-
national elite of engineers, who would birth California's high-tech industry. Within a dec-
ade after WWII, California's population had grown by almost 40%, surpassing 13 million.
CALIFORNIA'S CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Before the 1963 march on Washington, DC, the civil rights movement was well under way
in California.
When almost 120,000 Japanese Americans living along the West Coast were ordered
into internment camps by President Roosevelt in 1942, the Japanese American Citizens
League immediately filed suits that advanced all the way to the US Supreme Court. These
lawsuits established groundbreaking civil rights legal precedents, and in 1992 internees
received reparations and an official letter of apology signed by President George HW
Bush.
Adopting the non-violent resistance practices of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther
King Jr, labor leaders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta formed United Farm Workers in
1962 to champion the rights of under-represented immigrant laborers. Four years later,
Chavez and Californian grape pickers marched on Sacramento, bringing the issue of fair
wages and the health risks of pesticides to the nation's attention. When Bobby Kennedy
was sent to investigate, he sided with Chavez, bringing Latinos into the US political fold.
Erin Brockovich
(2000) is based on the true story of a Southern Californian mom who dis-
covered a small town being poisoned by industrial waste, and helped win a class-action
lawsuit that raised the standard for corporate accountability.
Hollywood & California Counterculture
In the early 20th century, California's greatest export was the sunny, wholesome image it
projected to the world through its homegrown film and TV industry. Southern California
