Sherrods Accused Of Exploiting Workers
Ron Wilkins is a former organizer in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee is an Africana Studies professor at California State University, Dominguez Hills.
Wilkins bio on a piece on Andrew Cockburn's and Jeffrey St. Clair's Counterpunch notes his history with the Sherrod's New Communities, Inc.:
In 1974, under an assumed name, he hired-on at New Communities Inc. The Emergency Land Fund, an Atlanta-based black land retention organization, which shared oversight responsibility for NCI's progress, wanted to know the basis for NCI's continued poor performance. The author's secondary purpose was to develop agricultural skills. For his role in organizing NCI's workers, management eventually fired him from his $40 per week position, evicted him from the rent-free shack on NCI property and orchestrated his arrest, on bogus charges, by FBI agents and Lee County, Georgia Sheriff's deputies in the midst of an NCI labor protest. The charges were later dropped.
Wilkins writes, from his personal experience, of exploitation by the Sherrods of black workers -- and not just black workers but black child laborers in the 1970s, and corroborates this by including a link to a PDF from a United Farm Workers newspaper from 1974. His link doesn't go to the exact paper, so I've picked up the permalink. Scroll down to the Children Farm Workers Strike Black Co-op on left (on page 2). Here's a screen shot I took of it.
An excerpt from Wilkins' Counterpunch piece:
Imagine farm workers doing back breaking labor in the sweltering sun, sprayed with pesticides and paid less than minimum wage. Imagine the United Farm Workers called in to defend these laborers against such exploitation by management. Now imagine that the farm workers are black children and adults and that the managers are Shirley Sherrod, her husband Rev. Charles Sherrod, and a host of others. But it's no illusion; this is fact.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.
When I first noticed the story of her firing and the association of Shirley Sherrod's name with the rural black poor and concern for "black land-loss", I wondered if the person being praised was the same Shirley Sherrod whom I knew. One piece posted on the July 23rd Alternet and captioned "Shirley Sherrod and the black Land Struggle" even claimed that she "devoted her entire life to economic justice". The mistreatment of black workers at NCI under the Sherrods is a matter of record that contradicts this claim.
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.
Don't forget that each of the Sherrods, Shirley and her husband Charles, got $150K for pain and suffering ($300K total, to the two of them) as part of a $13 million settlement for discrimination by the USDA against minority farmers.
Tom Blumer writes at the Washington Examiner:
If Charles and Shirley Sherrod are the civil-rights crusaders they now claim to be and not still the brutal managers they appear to have been, they would be tracking down those who used to work at NCI and distributing their $13 million USDA settlement to them. Right? After all, it was arguably won on the backs of exploited labor.
Does the level of wrongdoing, combined with the 35 years gone by, combined with the importance of Shirley Sherrod in the general scheme of things (prior to current events) really warrant this kind of attention?
clinky at August 5, 2010 9:19 AM
Amy Alkon
http://www.advicegoddess.com/archives/2010/08/05/sherrods_accuse.html#comment-1739893">comment from clinkyShe's a woman who got our tax dollars on a claim of being exploited -- and many more of our tax dollars than others who had claims ($50K was typical, I believe) -- yet it seems she and her husband exploited people terribly. I think that's noteworthy. No mea culpa heard from her on hiring child laborers, etc.
Amy Alkon
at August 5, 2010 10:11 AM
You can say all you want about the editing, even the full speech showed someone with some serious hate issues. The kind we do need to ferret out and get our of government work. Those jobs have been a haven for people like this too long.
momof4 at August 5, 2010 11:44 AM
Thanks for posting this.
Michelle at August 5, 2010 3:12 PM
Does the level of wrongdoing, combined with the 35 years gone by, combined with the importance of Shirley Sherrod in the general scheme of things (prior to current events) really warrant this kind of attention?
Posted by: clinky
It would if she were white. So why is eveyone trying to ignore it because shes black?
lujlp at August 5, 2010 6:28 PM
The weekend after Sherrod broke, I was listening to the Sirius POTUS channel. I couldn't listen to the whole thing because I would have been vomiting projectively.
They were all but excoriating a black U.S. representative (and others in the House) for not supporting a black farmers bill.
I was thinking -- "Where the fuck do you get off writing a bill that supports anybody on race?" If all farmers are going broke - you should be supporting them on their profession -- not on race, gender, sexual orientation or other personal attribute.
It would be the same as saying we will give a grant to columnists who are Jewish or Muslim and not if you are a Christian.
(Amy -- that is not a stab at you, it is used as an example.)
Jim P. at August 5, 2010 7:29 PM
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