The Sherrods and the Charades
Paul Harvey
As you can see from Sherrod's work here, anti-white racism is a terrible problem affecting us today, and it's wonderful of Breitbart et al to stand up against that malignancy. More seriously, if this fiasco helps resurrect and bring to light the careers of folks like the Sherrods, perhaps at least some things can work together for good -- even faux stories broadcast for politically manipulative purposes.
The last day or two, it's been hard to avoid the ugly story of the pseudo-"journalist" Andrew Breitbart's use of and/or manipulation of a bit of heavily doctored video relating a series of events from 25 years ago to slander Shirley Sherrod (he claims he "only" meant to slander the NAACP -- whatever).
Normally such a typically dishonest smear against an employee of the Department of Agriculture (and the Dept. of Agriculture administration's unfortunate haste to act in response to the falsely manufactured story) would not by itself initiate a post here at a blog dealing with very different matters. Except that Shirley Sherrod happens to be married to Charles Sherrod, a person of great interest to civil rights historians and religious history scholars alike.
Over at HNN (a precis of a piece from Salon), Joan Walsh properly calls attention to the career of Charles Sherrod. As a seminary student, he was deeply involved with the Albany project and matters of justice in Southwest Georgia more generally. He's not nearly as well known as some other figures of that time in the history of civil rights, but researching my book Freedom's Coming I was taken with his writings from that period of struggle, and particularly with the work of the Student Interracial Ministry, a group of students from Union Theological Seminary (maybe other places as well, I would have to look that up again) who served in some of the darker corners of the South. Update: see the comments section where Ralph Luker provides a bit more explanation of and firsthand account about the SIM program.
Of the Ministry and Sherrod, I wrote:
Working within the “ideological arm of the southern way of life” could lead only to complete frustration or total compliance. Impetus for change would have to come from the outside. The Student Interracial Ministry offered to free churches from their straitjacket. In this three–year retrospective, Sherrod reported some halting progress:
As you can see from Sherrod's work here, anti-white racism is a terrible problem affecting us today, and it's wonderful of Breitbart et al to stand up against that malignancy. More seriously, if this fiasco helps resurrect and bring to light the careers of folks like the Sherrods, perhaps at least some things can work together for good -- even faux stories broadcast for politically manipulative purposes.
Comments
You seem to be a stickler for accuracy, so I know you'll want to take this opportunity to correct yourself.
More importantly: the point of the post is Charles Sherrod, and the Sherrods relatively unknown history (even to some historians) in civil rights work. This other trivia is a distraction from grappling with this deep and important history, as well as the issues of religious history involved. So, comments on that point are invited.
I can also clarify things concerning the Student Interracial Ministry. It was started in the Summer of 1960 by four students from Union Theological Seminary in NY, in combination with three black student pastors from the ITC seminary in Georgia. From 1961 on, it included student participants from a wide variety of protestant theological schools throughout the country. It started, as Mr. Luker explained, as a program to place white seminary students in black southern churches for the summer and black students in white churches (some in the South, most in the North).
In the later period of SIM, students began to participate in direct action civil rights work. The two main centers of this were the Southwest Georgia Project, headed by Charles Sherrod and the Delta Ministry in Mississippi, sponsored by the National Council of Churches.
Sherrod was an early SNCC leader and worked in civil rights work from his time in college and seminary in Virginia on. He paused from his full time work in Southwest Georgia to return to seminary for an addditional degree, this time to Union in NY. He attended Union for two years, from 1964 to 1966. At Union, he actively recruited dozens of (mostly white) Union students to come and spend a summer or year+ working with him in Southwest Georgia. Sherrod was the leader of the SIM students, and the whole project, not a student participant.
Well, that is a brief clarification. I'd be glad to share more about SIM - I too am writing a disseration related to SIM - I have conducted oral history interviews with a dozen participants and I'm writing about the role of racial attitude change in their SIM experience.
Kirk Moll, Penn State Harrisburg, Adult Education Doctoral Student.