Left Exposes Sherrod Hypocrisy

By Jack Cashill

An insightful article in the sophisticated leftwing site, Counterpunch, further strips Ms. Shirley Sherrod of the martyr's rags she has been wearing since first exposed and then un-exposed as a racist Ag official two weeks back.

The author, Ron Wilkins, had worked under an assumed name at Sherrod's New Communities Incorporated (NCI) in the 1970s. A former organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, Wilkins had been tasked with discovering the reasons for "NCI's continued poor performance."

What he discovered was that at NCI "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."

So flagrant was the abuse at NCI that the United Farm Workers stepped in to protect black farm workers from exploitation. For Wilkins' role in organizing NCI's workers, management fired him from his $40 per week job, evicted him from his NCI-provided shack and even orchestrated his arrest. Wilkins tells the story better than I can in "The Other Side of Shirley Sherrod." Worth reading.