CHICAGO — It has been more than 50 years since the Rev. Jorge Morales boarded a plane from Chicago headed toward Coachella, California, to join a picket line in support of higher pay and benefits for farmworkers.

But the now 78-year-old Elmhurst resident can still remember César Chavez, the prominent co-founder of the United Farm Workers. He believed Chavez to be a man of “high integrity” who showed unwavering support to the farmworkers’ struggle.

That’s why he called the recent sexual abuse allegations leveled against Chavez so “unexpected.” Most of all, he’s heartbroken for the victims, Morales said.

“There’s no way to justify violence against women and particularly vulnerable young girls,” Morales told the Tribune Thursday. He also said, “It suddenly damages enormously and erases what Cesar left as a legacy of championing justice.”

Morales is one of many Chicagoland residents left reeling after a bombshell New York Times investigation revealed that the revered Latino labor leader allegedly groomed and sexually assaulted girls and women who worked in the movement, including Dolores Huerta, a UFW co-founder and renowned leader in her own right.

“Unfortunately, he used some of his great leadership to abuse women and children — it’s really awful,” Huerta told The New York Times.

The reaction to Wednesday’s story was swift and immediate as activists, elected officials and other leaders across the country began talking about changing institutions named in Chavez’s honor. On Thursday, Chicago Public Schools said in a statement that it has begun the process to consider a name change for César E. Chavez Multicultural Academic Center in the Back of the Yards neighborhood.

The district said it will begin to solicit feedback from the school community and bring recommendations to the school’s Local School Council for review.

“District and school leaders work with faculty, staff, families and students to create inclusive and respectful school environments,” the statement read. “If the César E. Chavez Multicultural Academic Center does initiate a name change, it will go through this open and public process to ensure that a new school name represents the values of its school community.”

Meanwhile, the Chicago Park District said it has initiated steps to remove Chavez from a mural in Barrett Park and is conducting a “districtwide review” of other park features that may honor him.

In addition to schools and murals, there is a post office and a portion of Blue Island Avenue in Pilsen named after him and a plaque at the Haymarket Memorial in the West Loop.

Gov. JB Pritzker said he knows Huerta, who supported him in his first run for governor in 2018, and that he believes her.

“I can just say to you that we ought to be listening to (survivors) about how we proceed now,” he said at an unrelated event in Chicago on Thursday.

“It’s very difficult,” Pritzker also said Thursday. “When you find out something posthumously about somebody and their name is on different things, and they’ve been celebrated in certain ways, and now you find out they may have done something really terrible.”

Huerta said she kept quiet about Chavez allegedly raping her in 1966 and pressuring her into sex in 1960 so as not to hurt the farmworker movement. She said both encounters led to pregnancies, which she kept secret, according to The New York Times.

In a 1998 interview with the Tribune, she spoke about her activism, including starting a grape boycott in the 1960s and ’70s. She said Chavez, who died in 1993, had a vision that was “20 years out in front” and that “we always worked as a team, but we used to argue a lot.”

“We never argued about philosophy because we shared the same philosophy,” she said at the time. “We argued about strategy. Should it be grapes or potatoes? Sometimes he would win, and sometimes I would win.”

Patrick O’Keefe, 75, of Waukegan, crossed paths with Chavez in 1969 when O’Keefe had traveled hundreds of miles from home to Canada for religious training. Chavez was there on tour to seek support for the farmworker cause, he said. He even played pool with him.

He said it was “heartrending” to find out a man he once met and looked up to likely isn’t who he believed him to be.

“It was shocking … to read that perhaps that was not true,” O’Keefe said by phone Thursday. “It kind of makes your stomach clench to realize that we didn’t know about that whole thing.”

For U.S. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, it’s “difficult and painful” to see such troubling accusations against someone he trusted as a leader. It feels like a “betrayal,” he said in a statement, adding that the women who spoke up showed a “tremendous amount of courage.”

“At the same time, no single person defines the movement for justice for farmworkers. This movement is bigger and more powerful than any one individual,” he said. “Right now, our priority must be supporting the survivors and making sure they are heard.”

Outside of César E. Chavez Multicultural Academic Center on Thursday, where a colorful mural of Chavez stands brightly painted on the building wall, María Mendieta stood waiting for her grandson to leave school.

“We were surprised,” Mendieta, 60, said of the abuse accusations. “Being such a popular man we saw him in a different light, but sometimes we categorize people one way and in reality they’re another.”

Mendieta said she had lived in the Back of the Yards neighborhood for over 25 years. Three of her daughters went to the school and three of her grandchildren attend now, she said. She’s in favor of changing its name if the accounts of sexual abuse are true.

“They should do justice, investigate, and if this is real, erase this undeserved name and change it,” she said.

Evelyn Aguayo, a community leader with Increase The Peace, an organization that promotes peace among youth through leadership development and community organizing, said the group supports Chavez’s name being removed from the school.

“As an organization, we know it’s important to highlight the work that was done, but it wasn’t only him,” Aguayo said. “I think that’s something we want to make sure is pointed out.”

Aguayo said this strikes home for her — both as a sexual assault survivor and as an older sister of a sibling attending Chavez Multicultural Academic Center.

“As an older sister, as a mentor to many young women, I don’t want them to think that people are just going to brush this issue aside and not fight their recognition,” Aguayo said. “So, I do not want to see César Chavez’s name on that school.”

____

(Chicago Tribune’s Olivia Olander contributed to this story.)

____

©2026 Chicago Tribune. Visit at chicagotribune.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.