Dolores Huerta will spend the evening March 16 with guests of the Oakland Public Library.

Huerta and Cesar Chavez founded the United Farm Workers union in 1962, to stop the exploitation of farmworkers and provide them with a better life. Huerta served as vice president of the union.

Huerta has been a social justice advocate and worked for the rights of laborers for more than 50 years.

She established the Dolores Huerta Foundation after receiving the Puffin/Nation $100,000 prize for Creative Citizenship in 2002.

Huerta has received many other awards, including The Eleanor Roosevelt Humans Rights Award from President Bill Clinton in 1998 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor in the United States, from President Barack Obama in 2012.

The free online event starts at 5:30 p.m. and ends at 6:30 p.m. Huerta will talk to guests about her life, her work and her legacy. A question-and-answer session will follow the talk.

The talk is designed for families, adults and teenagers. Registration is required.

The talk is made possible by the Friends of the Oakland Public Library, a nonprofit that raises money for the library.

Keith Burbank, Bay City News

Keith Burbank is currently a fulltime reporter covering Alameda County and Oakland news for Bay City News. He has also worked on the Data Points project for Local News Matters, finding trends and stories about the region through data. In 2019, he was a California Fellow at the USC Annenberg Center for Health Journalism, producing a series about homeless deaths in Santa Clara County. He worked as a swing shift editor for the newswire for several years as well. Outside of journalism, Keith enjoys computer programming, math, economics and music.