theblogprof: The Shirley Sherrod you never knew, and perhaps don't want to

Saturday, August 7, 2010

The Shirley Sherrod you never knew, and perhaps don't want to

A couple of things. First, thank goodness for the internet, without which we wouldn’t get half the truth regarding stories the MSM peddles. Second, you won’t see any of this is the MSM. None. A classic case of MSM blackout. You see, the MSM is invested in Shirley Sherrod – the black Mother Teresa, so much so that they have effectively banned any further interviews with her after she went off the rails during a CNN interview with Anderson “teabagger” Cooper accusing Andrew Breitbart on the air of wanting to bring back slavery. Thus, this couple of stories just fit the narrative whatsoever. As in this story is the proverbial round peg that can’t be fit into their square template. First, from moonbattery: The Pigford Pig-Out

Zombie summarizes the 1999 Pigford v Glickman decision, by which 16,000 black farmers were handed $50,000 jackpots for making the extremely dubious claim that the USDA discriminated against them during the administration of the First Black President, Slick Willie Clinton.

Afterwards, other blacks saw all the free money flying around and wanted their piece of the pie. So in 2008, a junior Senator named Barack Hussein Obama sponsored a bill to reopen the case. Over 70,000 black farmers are expected to line up for the next round of handouts, for a total of 86,000 luxuriant rides on the gravy train, courtesy of tax slaves and their children.

Seated on a plush throne at the front of that train is our old friend Shirley Sherrod, the race-baiting bureaucrat the media has tried to pass off as the next Rosa Parks. She exploited the Pigford scam to collect a staggering $13 million of OUR MONEY for being "oppressed" just before she took her position at the USDA.

39,687 black farmers and 86,000 of them complaints. In the Obama world, those numbers actually make sense. But back to Sherrod, not only did she enrich herself via this scheme that can only be seen as some sort or reparation, she also apparently earned a living before that by being a slave master of the corporation that lead to the discrimination suits in the first place! From Counter Punch via Instapundit: The Other Side of Shirley Sherrod, Get a load of this first hand account:

The swirling controversy over the racist dismissal of Shirley Sherrod from her USDA post has obscured her profoundly oppositional behavior toward black agricultural workers in the 1970s. What most of Mrs. Sherrod’s supporters are not aware of is the elitist and anti-black-labor role that she and fellow managers of New Communities Inc. (NCI) played. These individuals under-paid, mistreated and fired black laborers–many of them less than 16 years of age–in the same fields of southwest Georgia where their ancestors suffered under chattel slavery.

…If confession is good for the soul, then Mrs. Sherrod took a first step toward her redemption by admitting the error of her ways in her earlier attitudes toward poor white farmers. Mrs. Sherrod says she began to see poverty as more central than race. So, should indigent black child farm laborers warrant less reflection by Mrs. Sherrod? What lessons does she have to share from her tenure as management when she had power over her own people working under deplorable conditions at the same New Communities, Inc.(NCI) identified in the current issue? Shirley Sherrod could have included this chapter of her history in the same confession speech. Justice and integrity require at least as much accountability from Mrs. Sherrod to the poor black farm workers of NCI as to the white farmers she came to befriend. This lack of full disclosure of the whole truth is a “sin of omission” that trivializes the suffering of poor black farm workers and exacerbates the offenses of NCI.

Shirley Sherrod was New Communities Inc. store manager during the 1970s. As such, Mrs. Sherrod was a key member of the NCI administrative team, which exploited and abused the workforce in the field. The 6,000 acre New Communities Inc. in Lee County promoted itself during the latter part of the 1960s and throughout the 70s as a land trust committed to improving the lives of the rural black poor. Underneath this facade, the young and old worked long hours with few breaks, the pay averaged sixty-seven cents an hour, fieldwork behind equipment spraying pesticides was commonplace and workers expressing dissatisfaction were fired without recourse.

The unfortunate story of Mrs. Annie Hawkins and her family in particular is instructive. Persuaded by NCI that their lot would be improved, the Hawkins family stole away from the Georgia plantation that they had called home. After suffering abuse meted out to them and others at NCI, Mrs. Hawkins sadly stated that, “We stole away from one plantation, but just ended up on another.” For her courageous role in demonstrations against the Sherrods and NCI management, Annie Hawkins and her family were fired and kicked out of the house that they were promised. ….

Worker protest at New Communities eventually garnered some assistance from the United Farm Workers Union in nearby Florida in the person of one of its most formidable organizers, black State Director, the late Mack Lyons. The September 28, 1974 UFW newspaper El Malcriado, page two, reported on the worker’s strike (“Children Farm Workers Strike Black Co-op” www.farmworkermovement.org/ufwarchives) and the UFW stepped in to protect black farm workers from exploitation by NCI. Fearful of both UFW efforts to unionize NCI’s labor force and scrutiny by the Georgia State Wage and Hour Division, the Sherrods and NCI management hastily issued checks in varying amounts to strikers to makeup ostensibly for minimum wage differentials. It is bitter irony that the Sherrods have succeeded in being awarded $300,000 following a discrimination lawsuit, while Mrs. Hawkins and other impoverished NCI black laborers whom NCI exploited were never adequately compensated for their “pain and suffering”.

While it is true that loan discrimination and relentless creditors can be cited for the eventual demise of New Communities Inc. in 1985, NCI’s unfair labor practices and poor leadership, were equally, if not more, to blame. Ask Shirley Sherrod about this part of her history. I know this story well, for I was one of those workers at NCI.

Read the rest, including writer Ron Wilkins’ bio. If his account is to be believed, it is devastating to the Sherrod narrative. Why is it then that you don’t see Wilkins interviewed by every MSM outlet? CNN? MSNBC? ABC, NBC, CBS? Hello? Bueller???

Previously:

Liberals kneecap Chris Matthews, force anchor to reshoot entire show due to lack of liberal bias

CNN's Anderson Cooper: On second thought, I shouldn't have let Shirley Sherrod racist smear of Andrew Breitbart go unchallenged

Howard Dean, MSM caught (again) in repeated lie that FoxNews caused Sherrod to be fired