Happy Birthday Elfie Balis: you might not know his name but you have seen his civil rights work
"We all are one people whose lives affect each other. There is no them. Only us."
Today is Elfie's birthday... he has passed away but his birthday still pops up on my facebook. He was on facebook the year before he passed away.
One if his good friends/admirers posted the article about Elfie. Elfie was an incredible resource of civil rights/workers/ human rights history. check out is documentaries and photographs... and his sustainable living info.
I'm only posting some of the article.
Smiling Seriously: Creative Genius at Work
http://fresnoalliance.com/wordpress/?p=2004#comment-98309
Elfie has a long history in photojournalism beginning on the streets of Chicago in 1951. In 1953, Ballis escaped his wire editor job at the Wall Street Journal in San Francisco to become editor of the Valley Labor Citizen (VLC), the publication of the Fresno, Madera, Kings and Tulare Central Labor Council (CLC). He was the editor until 1966 when a dispute arose over the paper’s support of Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Worker movement. The local liberal union leaders supported Elfie through his editorial unkindnesses to Jimmy Hoffa, George Meany and the then racist building trades unions, but they balked when their paper printed big-time support for La Huelga. Elfie resigned just before he would have been fired. The publication folded soon after and remained dormant for more than 20 years. (In an interesting twist of fate, the CLC publication was resurrected in 2000 when John Veen, then the editor of the Community Alliance, left this publication and became the editor of the new Valley Labor Citizen. But that is another story.)
In the mid-1950s, Ballis started chronicling the lives of farmworkers and the United Farm Worker union in the Central Valley. His pictures are unique because he was a part of the lives of farmworkers and the movement to build the union. He was not seen, and did not see himself, as an outsider trying to get a few pictures of these hard workers who put food on the nation’s table. His relationship to the farmworker movement was one of mutual respect and admiration. Elfie views himself as an advocate—not a documentarian or a “news” person. Today, you will see Elfie’s pictures of farmworkers enshrined in monuments, posters and most books and films honoring Cesar Chavez and the United Farm Worker movement. Elfie views the farmworker movement “as a natural for me. My photographic passions are focused on people, organizing and Big Mama (the Earth), issues all wrapped up in the farmworker movement. At 15, I began my work career in the fields pollinating corn for new hybrids for a Minnesota seed company. In the late ’60s, I was a part-time organizer for a farmworker union that preceded the United Farm Workers union.”
In 1963–1964, Elfie photographed and researched with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the Mississippi civil rights movement. In the summer of 1964, he traveled from Mississippi to the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City with the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegates. He photographed these democratically elected delegates who were not seated via a sellout by Walter Reuther, Martin Luther King and Hubert Humphrey.
View the Elfie-Maia video at www.sunmt.org/archives.html. Links from there will take you to many more details about the work at SunMt, as well as some interesting information about Elfie’s earlier life as a Marine in the Pacific Islands during World War II. He joined up at 18 in 1943. Elfie recalls: “The Marines kept their promise. They made a man out of me. Only it was not the man they had in mind.”