DETROIT – Anyone who has driven past La SED’s headquarters on the corner of W. Vernor near Clark Park in southwest Detroit has seen it: A large, mosaic mural of the late Cesar Chavez, the co-founder of the United Farm Workers, who helped lead one of the biggest labor movements of the 20th Century.
However, after a March 18 New York Times story unearthed claims of decades of sexual abuse by Chavez, who died in 1993, against women and teenage girls, including Dolores Huerta, his longtime partner in the labor movement, the mural has taken on a different light.
“It makes us reassess our human need to place someone on a pedestal,” Mary Carmen Muñoz, La SED’s executive director, said on Friday. “I think this made us reevaluate our own actions and how responsible leaders are to not only themselves, but their community…