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Shirley Sherrod getting back to business
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by YankeeJim | July 22, 2010 at 10:54 am
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I didn’t know much about Shirley before the story broke. I still think her remarks to the NAACP may have been better couched, but when Julian Bond came to her defense, I listened and am moved. So, Shirley will get to go back to work, and many of us her age, will not get that opportunity.
“"Picking cotton, picking cucumbers, shaking peanuts, doing all that work on the farm. It'll make you want to get an education more than anything," she told NAACP members gathered for a banquet in Douglas, Ga. "The discrimination that we had to endure made you just want to leave."
She stayed and joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1965, committed to integration and securing voting rights for blacks. Charles Sherrod, a minister, became the committee's field director in southwest Georgia, according to history books and friends of the Sherrods.
Julian Bond, a civil rights leader and former NAACP chairman, said Charles was "good, brave and courageous," going into rural counties outside of Albany. Friends say Shirley was right there with him.
Once SNCC began to devolve, she became a welfare rights activist and began working on community projects, including New Communities -- a cooperative that grew soybeans, corn, cotton and fruit. For 15 years, it was the largest black-owned farming organization in the country.
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at 14:57 on July 22nd, 2010
This still seems suspect to me. I know white racist farmers who don't know they are racists. I know white farmers who were once racists and now don't think they are because they know better, but still act like it.
I know African Americans who are bitter toward whites. They might like to get over it, but their wounds have yet to heal. I suspect that might be the case with Shirley. I don't blame her, but she should not be in a position of power with unhealed wounds and propensity toward bias--even if she has good intentions.