The achievements of the United Farm Workers outlive Chavez’s abuse | Opinion

When you walk through the Idaho Anne Frank Human Rights Memorial, you are surrounded by the words of people who changed the world: Mahatma Gandhi, Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Jr. Their ideas are etched in stone because they spoke truths that point toward something larger than any single life.

But none of the people quoted on those walls were perfect. Some caused real harm. And the memorial does not ask us to pretend otherwise.

The memorial asks something harder: to accept that a person can articulate a profound truth about human dignity and still fail to live it fully.The work of justice has never depended on finding perfect leaders, but on building shared commitments strong enough to outlast any individual’s failures.

This tension is in the news right now. A recent New York Times investigation revealed that Cesar Chávez — who organized one of the most important labor movements in American history, giving voice and power to farmworkers exploited for generations — sexually abused women and girls within the movement. Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers with Chávez, has come forward at age 95 to say that she, too, was assaulted.

The courage and sacrifice of that movement were real. And so was the abuse.

Huerta’s decades of silence reveal how deeply hierarchical movements can trap even the strongest people inside systems that prioritize a leader’s reputation over the safety of those they were built to protect.

This is not a new story. We have seen it in religious institutions, political parties and the Epstein files. The settings change; the structure repeats. When a movement focuses on a person rather than principles, protecting that individual becomes paramount, and the people it should serve become expendable.

The lesson is not that leaders don’t matter. They do. But pedestals concentrate power. They make it easy for those closest to a leader to look away, and for those harmed to believe their suffering is a necessary cost.

What if we built differently?

We have evidence that it is possible. When white supremacist groups established a compound in northern Idaho in the 1970s, the community’s response could have coalesced around a single charismatic figure. Instead, Bill Wassmuth and others deliberately built a coalition: the Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations. Its leadership was distributed across clergy, educators, business owners, law enforcement and neighbors. The work belonged to the community, not to one person. And when Wassmuth left Idaho, the movement did not collapse — because it had never depended on him alone. The coalition outlasted the hate groups it was built to confront.

That model — principles over personality, shared ownership over hierarchy — is what we carry forward through the Wassmuth Powerful Practices. These are not aspirations held by leaders at the top. They are habits anyone can take up: listening deeply enough to hear what hierarchies silence, designing spaces where no one has to trade safety for access, and building momentum by noticing what is working rather than waiting for a heroic figure to carry it. These practices distribute leadership. They do not rise or fall with any single person.

We can learn from the people whose words live in the memorial without worshipping them. We can honor what Chávez accomplished while refusing to excuse what it cost the people inside it. We can hold Huerta’s courageous leadership in one hand and her agonizing silence in the other, and let both sharpen our resolve to build structures where no one has to make that choice.

The bright spots in history are real. So are the failures. The question is whether we build movements that learn from both, or keep replicating systems that demand loyalty to people over fidelity to principles.

The wise words in the memorial were not carved in stone to honor the people who said them. They are there to challenge us. This is the unfinished work: to build something together that embodies our highest values.

Jess Westhoff is the education director for the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights. She also serves on the Human Rights Educators USA steering committee, is an Auschwitz Legacy Fellow and contributes to the Idaho Museum of International Diaspora’s Academics and Research Program team. Christina Bruce-Bennion is the executive director for the Wassmuth Center for Human Rights. She worked in various leadership capacities in refugee resettlement in the Valley for over 24 years before joining the Wassmuth Center in 2022.

This story was originally published March 31, 2026 at 12:00 PM.