Remembering Cesar Chavez

Had he been killed in midlife, as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King were, Cesar Chavez would be one of those 1960s figures whose name brings instant recognition and a lump in the throat. We would speak of him today as the Chicano labor leader who was about to transform the lives of the nation’s farm workers when an assassin’s bullet intervened.

There was, however, no such dramatic arc to Cesar Chavez’s life. His death this past April at age sixty-six was front-page new...