Clifford Cody Obituary - Visitation & Funeral Information

Farm Labor leader dies, leaves legacy for Suffolk County’s poorest workers Clifford Cody, known to thousands of Long Islanders as a leader of the farm worker cause, died on July 13 at Stony Brook University Hospital. He was over 84½ years old. Cody’s reputation as an oral historian of the farm worker struggle of the East Coast migrant stream was well known among church and business leaders, academics and activists. He was a former member of the Black Panthers Organization of Long Island; a founder of the Long Island Farm Worker Service Center; President of the Organizing Committee of Eastern Farm Workers Association (EFWA), and of the Suffolk County Workers Benefit Council. In 1968, Cody became a founding member of the Long Island Farm Worker Service Center on Railroad Avenue in Riverhead where he helped to organize volunteer doctors and nurses to provide healthcare free of charge to farm workers, and to run the free breakfast program for children of farm worker families operated by the Black Panthers out of the Service Center. He helped Panther organizers get onto farm labor camps to recruit additional members and promote their free breakfast program for children and their educational activities. In 1972, after the Railroad Avenue center closed, Cody helped to found EFWA, and began taking volunteer organizers to the remote farm labor camps. Cody was born in Augusta, Georgia to Louise Ficklin, a domestic worker in private employment, and James Cody. His father moved to Chicago to find work in the Depression at a can factory. At age 13, Cody joined his father there, and went to work at a sawmill. After five years in Chicago, Cody returned to Augusta where he found work extracting oil from cottonseed for 60 cents an hour. After four years and still earning just 60 cents an hour at the oil mill, Cody met a crew chief hiring workers to pick potatoes in Virginia. On the promise of better pay, Cody and several friends entered the migrant stream, picking potatoes by hand one day and grading them the next. When a recruiter for a crew chief in Riverhead offered more money than he was making, Cody went to work on a farm labor camp in Suffolk County in 1959. The workday started at 5 a.m. and often ended as late as 11 p.m. The farm workers were commonly left with $1.00 each for a week’s labor after the company deducted living expenses from their paychecks. Unwilling to work under these conditions, Cody soon left the labor camp and found a better paying job at a moving company, but he was not willing to leave his brother farm workers behind. Cody also led teams of EFWA volunteers and members who worked in the potato industry to the camps housing Puerto Rican farm workers, who came to Long Island under U.S. government contract, demonstrating the importance of unifying all farm workers, regardless of race or ethnic background. In October 1998, he spoke at the UN Church Center to the United Methodist General Board of Global Ministries, which holds Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) status at the UN, on behalf of the Suffolk County Workers Benefit Council Speakers Bureau. Cody played a leading role in expanding support for the farm workers in the faith-based community from Bayport United Methodist, to Westhampton Presbyterian, to the Jewish Center of the Hamptons, and in establishing long-lasting relationships for EFWA with development partners such as the Simons Foundation, the Hagedorn Foundation and the Long Island Community Trust. In May 2004, Trinity Episcopal Wall Street Church invited an EFWA development team of three organizers to attend a three-day retreat, held for their grant recipients, and program staff at their center in West Cornwall, Connecticut. The program coordinator invited Cody to be a featured guest speaker, embodying the retreat’s theme of “transformation,” by describing his history, starting as a migrant worker and becoming a professional volunteer farm labor organizer. Cody also led EFWA’s information tables at the annual Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of Long Island, attended by over 400 church delegations. In August 2020, author Mark Torres interviewed Cody for his book on the history of farm labor camps on Long Island, Dust for Blood. Torres had approached EFWA for firsthand information on farm workers and conditions on the labor camps in the 1940s-70s, and Torres concluded his chapter on efforts to change conditions on the camps by recognizing Cody’s role in that struggle. Cody is survived by his brother Ronnie Ficklin (wife Emily) of Thomson, Georgia, his uncles Willie E. Ficklin and Willie F. Ficklin of Warrenton, Georgia, his aunts Mary Ficklin and Evelyn Ficklin of Nassau County, New York and his fellow organizers from across the United States. He will be missed by thousands of members of EFWA who have benefited from his leadership, hundreds of organizers who have been inspired by his example and hundreds of thousands of workers across the country who have gained from a movement for which the life and leadership of Clifford Cody laid a foundation for the future. Visitation will be Friday, July 22, 2022 at the Robertaccio Funeral Home Inc. in Patchogue. Funeral Services will be 11am Saturday morning, July 23, 2022 at New Bethel First Pentecostal Church, Station Road in Bellport. Burial will follow at Riverhead Cemetery.

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Clifford Cody

July 13, 2022