The CSO in San Jose, CA gave a young Cesar Chavez his first training in organizing, which he would later use in founding the United Farm Workers.
This chapter of the CSO became politically active and helped to elect Roybal to the City Council of Los Angeles in 1949, the first Mexican-American to serve as such since the 19th century.
After quitting his caseworker job, Ross worked for the Farm Security Administration, which was in charge of relief programs in the Coachella Valley.
[4] After the war, Ross worked for the American Council of Race Relations, whose goal was to "create unity, and end the riots…between whites and minorities."
Ross spearheaded Civic Unity Leagues in California's conservative Citrus Belt, bringing Mexican- and black Americans together to battle segregation.
In Orange County, parents organized by Ross won a landmark lawsuit (Mendez v. Westminster School District) in 1947 that paved the way for the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education desegregation decision in 1954.
He organized in Southern California for six years before moving on to San Jose, which was the largest Spanish center outside of Los Angeles.
[4] Ross worked on voter registration in Riverside County, in the town of Belltown, where there was a segregation problem in the public schools.
The mainly Hispanic area was the Casa Blanca barrio, but their city council representative was an orange grower that refused to visit the people and address their grievances because of previous worker strikes against him.
Ross, alongside numerous NAACP workers, registered voters in this area and unified the Hispanic community to vote against the orange grower in the city council election.
[4] It was during his organizing in Southern California that Ross developed the house-meeting technique that he would soon teach to Cesar Chavez; it would become the hallmark tactic of the UFW.
Fred Ross also trained Ellie Cohen in the housemeeting method around nuclear weapons proliferation that she developed into a swing congressional district grassroots organizing approach.