Cal State East Bay closed for Cesar Chavez Day observance Monday, March 31

• March 25, 2014 8:00am

The Cal State East Bay campuses in Hayward and Concord, as well as the university's Oakland Conference Center, will be closed all day Monday, March 31, in observance of the César Chávez holiday. Regular university business hours will resume on Tuesday, April 1, when CSUEB begins classes for the spring academic quarter.

The holiday is intended to promote community service in memory of the life and work of Chavez, who was an American farm worker, labor leader and civil rights activist from 1952 until his death in 1993.

He worked in the fields until the early 1950s, when he became an organizer for the Community Service Organization (CSO), a Latino civil rights group. It was in that capacity that Chavez urged Mexican Americans to register and vote, while traveling throughout California and around the country making speeches in suport of workers' rights. He co-founded the National Farm Workers (UFW) union with Delores Huerta in 1962.

-- Barry Zepel