Since there was a lot of interest in my piece last night on the 1965 killing of Shirley Sherrod's father, Hosie Miller, I wanted to call attention to two excellent pieces that add more layers of context to what was going on back on Baker County, Ga., in those days -- not really that long ago (within my lifetime, certainly).
The first is by Elizabeth Holtzman, the former Watergate-era New York congresswoman, who as a young lawyer worked on a race-related case there:
Screws' deputy, L. Warren Johnson, carried the tradition forward when he became sheriff. In 1961, Johnson, a huge, hulking, 300-pound man, came to the home of Charlie Ware, a small, slight black man, and arrested and handcuffed him for reasons that were unclear then, as now. Forcing Ware into his car, Johnson picked up the radio microphone and announced that Ware was coming at him with a knife and that he was going to shoot him. The sheriff thereupon shot the small, handcuffed man three times in the neck, but Ware miraculously survived. Although the sheriff should have been prosecuted, it was Ware who was charged with attempted murder, a charge that carried the death penalty.
Tonight the always-on-top-of-it Joan Walsh, the editor of Salon.com, has a great look at Sherrod's husband, the renowned civil rights activist Charles Sherrod:
Sherrod was SNCC's first field secretary, and he co-founded the Albany movement after a student sit-in at the local bus station (to test a recently enacted desegregation law) led to a years-long campaign that ultimately involved Martin Luther King Jr. and the intervention of President John F. Kennedy. He traveled to the historic (and almost all-white) 1964 Democratic National Convention, when the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party fought for more black representation. He was jailed several times and stayed with SNCC until 1966, when Stokely Carmichael became chair and whites were expelled, but he'd already become more focused on his work in southwest Georgia than SNCC politics. Sherrod got his doctor of divinity degree from New York's Union Theological Seminary, then returned to Albany to found the Southwest Georgia Independent Voters Project, then the agricultural cooperative New Communities Inc. He served 14 years on the Albany City Council, and he still lives there, known to civil rights movement veterans but obscure to the wider world, until his wife was attacked by the ignorant bullies of the right.
"We tend to think of civil rights workers as people who, it was an episode in their life before they went on and did something else," says Clayborne Carson, SNCC historian and director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford. "But Sherrod is an exemplar of those people who didn't leave the movement. They stayed, and they're still fighting, to this day.
History always matters -- when it's accurate. If you care about what's happening in America in 2010, learn the truth about what happened in Georgia in the early 1960s.
Cue racist troll comments 3...2...1...— BillHicksLives!
Terrible times. I was a kid, but I remember the turmoil. Marches, rallies, demonstrations. Violent mob scences. Police misconduct in democratic strongholds in the south. It was 50 years ago. Thankfully our society has moved on. The left wants us to believe that same kind of turmoil is now going on so as to deflect from 0bama's dangerous and anti-American agenda. Despicable! We are no more in the 1960s than we are in the 1560s. To pretend that the times are the same is inaccurate and a flat lie. This is the same tactic journolist (Bunch and his fellow travelers) used to turn attention away from the Rev. Wright controversy. Most of us learned from that time. You have hit a low I didn't think even you were capable of. Shame on you.— georgel
Georgel, trying to change the subject much? Maybe you should try saying that the left wants you to try the truth out for once and that's too scary.— HandNik- Also, why do you people keep talking about journolist instead of policies? Why can't you stand on your policies? Beck, Limbaugh, and Breitbart run your lives. Give you a buzzword and watch you try to blame every issue on that instead of policies.— HandNik
Handnik, thats easy, they have nothing to talk about. No regressive agenda, even by their own leaders words. Cant have an agenda or policies; regressives live by agendas and worship the talking points of their mascots.— Les Ismore- "regressives live by agendas" my bad, regressives live by slogans.— Les Ismore
If you care about what's happening in America in 2010, you might as well learn the truth about what happened in the Armenian Genocide. When the race-baiting left-wing politicians realize that their fabricated claims of right-wing anti-black racism aren't getting traction with American voters who are tired of the left's same old predictable calumny, they will start blaming the murder of Armenians on the white man. This crying of wolf is a pathetic attempt to distract the American people from the disastrous leadership we currently have, in 2010, in Washington, DC. Vile mendacity.— Mr. Smith- "regressives live by slogans." Hope. Change.— RG
- Mr. Smith does raise a good point. Cutting up a video of a woman talking about racial unity to make it look like she's boasting about discrimination, and posting it on the web is not race-baiting. Pointing out that the person who posted that video was deliberately trying to stimulate racial division is race-baiting. See, it's very easy actually. Here's another one. I'll start it, and everyone can try it themselves. People carrying pictures of Obama with a bone through his nose at Tea Party rallies isn't race-baiting. Pointing out that people were ...... Go ahead, try it for yourself.— Talking point sleuth
Comment removed.- Comment removed.
- Don't forget "No War For Oil" And "Bush Lied, People Died". Cuz the wars ended as soon as Obama took over.— RG
- OK, now that you've all gotten the hang of it, here's a little test you can try at home. Look at the following quote. Race-baiting, or not race-baiting. ////// Posted 10:40 PM, 07/19/2010 bill.atkin. Keep going Sloth. Keep defending the Democrat bigot. She must be innocent, that's why the fat bigoted slob QUIT! LOL! Popcorn! STAT! \\\\\\ OK, now give it a try on your own, and I'll check back later to see how you're doing. Oh, and RG, yes, I'll give you some cyber-sardines as a reward if you get it right.— Talking point sleuth
- The President's poll numbers are down, and Democrats' poll numbers are down and everyone on the left is flailing around trying to distract or change the subject from their ineptitude. What other explanation is there for all of the recent false eruptions of race baiting from the left? Was there some event that happened, other than the election and subsequent bunker protection of our half-AA President? I understand the history of racism in this country going back 250 years, I understand the history of racism goes back as far as human migration. But why now, is everyone on the left laser focused on fomenting racial division? How does such a thing happen in such concerted fashion? It's highly coincidental.— Mr. Smith
- ===}}}} What other explanation is there for all of the recent false eruptions of race baiting from the left? {{{==== An absolute classic, Mr. Smith. A rightwing extremist posts a deceptively edited video on his widely read website under the banner "Video proof of racism at the NAACP," and it is a "race-baiting eruption from the left." Hilarious. An instant classic. Thanks for the best laugh yet this morning.— Talking point sleuth
Will Bunch, a senior writer at the Philadelphia Daily News, blogs about his obsessions, including national and local politics and world affairs, the media, pop music, the Philadelphia Phillies, soccer and other sports, not necessarily in that order.
E-mail Will by clicking here.
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