New Black Icon Bites the Dust: The Sherrods, Slavemasters
All social movements require a hero or a heroine, someone who exemplifies the goals and aspirations of the movement, someone to admire as an icon, someone to point to as a model for their younger members to emulate.
Communist Cubans had their Che’, liberal Americans have their Obama, farmworkers had their Chavez, and African-Americans recently crowned a new heroine, Shirley Sherrod. Her status was upgraded to icon after her dust up with the NAACP, the USDA, the president, and Andrew Breitbart over a video excerpt.
Now it turns out that even if the video was misleading and Sherrod wasn’t preaching race hatred, she, and her husband Charles, are hardly pure as the driven snow. Both have a seamy history of virtual enslavement, discrimination, and gross mistreatment of their farm workers in the 1970’s.
No doubt that record will be dismissed as ancient history by some of Sherrod’s champions but it’s difficult to dismiss out of hand unless we also discount and dismiss all instances of discrimination if they took place thirty or so years ago.
I say “some champions” will defend her since it’s far from all.
Among those who have exposed Sherrod’s past is none other than Joe R. Hicks, former director of a Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) chapter and Ron Wilkins, former organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), two black activist organizations. . .
(Read more at http://www.genelalor.com/blog1/?p=1829)
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