On CA Hall of Fame red carpet, state-honored heroes reflect on Cesar Chavez’s fall
Some of the state’s highest-profile figures — famous actresses and politicians, athletes and mountaineers, scientists and innovators — walked down the red carpet Thursday night to be inducted into the California Museum Hall of Fame as trailblazers and state heroes.
They did so as the Golden State confronted horrifying new revelations about the late civil rights leader Cesar Chavez, who was among the most revered of Californians until this week. On Wednesday morning, the New York Times published verified allegations of sexual assault, rape and grooming against the labor leader, including allegations from women who said they were as young as 12 and 13 when the abuse began.
The California Museum was among the many, many institutions across the state and beyond left to confront the fallout from the Times’ searing report. Later Wednesday, the museum’s board of trustees stated it would be removing Chavez from the Hall of Fame roster. He was inducted in 2006, in the Hall of Fame’s inaugural class, after Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his then-wife Maria Shriver founded the institution that year. The award was posthumous — Chavez died in 1993, at the age of 66.
Chavez was among the first 13 people placed on the roster, and he is the first ever to be removed. The board had to quickly come up with protocols to do so.
“As this is an unprecedented situation for the California Hall of Fame,” the museum’s board of trustees wrote said in a statement, “the Board is immediately establishing a protocol to manage his removal and that of any other inductee should it be necessary going forward. Our hearts go out to the survivors of abusive behavior from this man, whom so many regarded as a hero.”
New California ‘heroes among our society’
Just one day later, the museum held its annual gala to ring in a new class of heroes, selected with a focus on Los Angeles as that city recovers from last year’s wildfires and turmoil of the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement actions.
Schwarzenegger was among the new inductees, though he did not attend the event.
Joining him were actress Jamie Lee Curtis, and the Olympic athletes Carl Lewis and Janet Evans, who each won multiple gold medals.
Also enrolled was the pioneering sushi chef Nobuyuki Matsuhisa; the scientist and author Riane Eisler; the author Terry McMillan; and America’s first all-women mariachi ensemble: the Mariachi Reyna de Los Angeles. Legendary California politician John Burton was posthumously inducted.
The ceremony started with a trip down the red carpet, where the inductees, past inductees and other dignitaries posed for photographs, stood for TV cameras and in some cases, spoke to reporters about holding such a ceremony at a moment when the state was reflecting, deeply and for many painfully, on the newly surfaced details about Chavez’s alleged sexual abuse.
“We have to have heroes,” Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis said. “It is important to elevate people for their good work. What we have learned about Cesar Chavez is more than just what we would think of as ordinary human failings. There were real victims. But that shouldn’t stand in the way of looking for heroes among our society.”
Lewis, who won nine Olympic gold medals as a track and field athlete, echoed many state leaders this week who have called for people to separate the farmworker movement from the man who, for decades, led it. The state “can look back and correct the mistakes that were made,” he said, “but I think we still can’t change the fact of the sacrifice and the (gains) that were so important to other people.”
“We learn and we change and we do things differently,” he said.
Pablo Espinoza, a former broadcast reporter and staff member for a series of California Assembly speakers who serves on the museum’s board, said he hoped Hall of Fame inductees were reminded of the responsibility of the recognition.
“The most important thing we can do as we try to follow our dreams is to treat others the way that we’d like to be treated,” he said, “so we hope that the medals that people receive and wear around their necks is a reminder of that golden rule.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom reacts
The Hall of Fame inducted Dolores Huerta, who cofounded the United Farm Workers with Chavez, in 2013, its seventh class. But she told The New York Times that even as they built their movement, she kept secret Chavez’s own abuses against her. On Wednesday, in a statement, she said Chavez pressured her into a sexual encounter once and raped her a second time.
She kept the secret, she said, because she didn’t want to harm the movement’s momentum.
Gov. Gavin Newsom told reporters Thursday evening she would have attended the event under other circumstances.
“What’s hanging over the event for me is Dolores is usually here,” he said. “Everybody is processing in real time, and we’re making decisions in real time ... conversations are being had in probably every major city in the United States that had a Cesar Chavez boulevard, has a park, a playground.”
Less than six blocks north of the California Museum in downtown Sacramento is Cesar E. Chavez Plaza, which city leaders said Wednesday they plan to rename.
Newsom described personal shock as he read through the New York Times story and came to the part where Huerta shared her own story. “I had to reread it,” he said. And he also pondered whether there was a lesson to be learned in whether streets and holidays and schools should honor individual leaders over social movements as a whole.
“Are we better off, not necessarily always having an individual?” he said, “it’s never one individual, as much as someone may have pushed the movement or symbolized the movement... so it’s opened up that space for different conversations going forward which I think frankly is probably long overdue and a healthy space.”
As the governor pondered the question, his staff and First Partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom sought to get him moving away from the television cameras and into the event.
The red carpet had largely cleared, and it was time to induct a new class of California heroes.
This story was originally published March 19, 2026 at 10:00 PM.
