Civil Rights Historian: Obama Has "Lost It" on Civil Liberties

Speaking of President Obama's firing of civil rights leader Shirley Sherrod, civil rights historian Clayborne Carson said: "This is a symbol of something much larger: On civil liberties issues, he's just lost it. Nobody should ever be dismissed from a position for something they're saying on Fox [TV]. As a matter of principle, you don't fire someone without some kind of internal due process and investigation. But this is an administration that can order the assassination of an American citizen. It's disappointing, to say the least."

Carson, who is historian of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the director of the MLK Research and Education Institute at Stanford, was quoted in a Salon article on Shirley Sherrod and her husband Charles. Charles Sherrod is a legendary—and still highly-respected—civil rights leader in southwest Georgia, who was a founder of SNCC and its first field secretary. Significantly, in today's context, Sherrod welcomed white volunteers into the civil rights movement when many in SNCC opposed it, a dispute which eventually led to breakup of SNCC and the emergence of the "black power" grouping around Stokely Carmichael.

All of this would have been known to anyone looking at Shirley Sherrod's background—but clearly, the White House did no such thing. Although Obama has tried to blame Agricultural Secretary Tom Vilsack for Shirley Sherrod's firing, CNN reported on Tuesday that Obama was fully briefed and supported Vilsack's action. As the Huffington Post put it in a banner headline today: "The buck stops ... somewhere else."

Informed sources have told EIR that it was White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel who told Vilsack to fire Sherrod. Consistent with this report, the Huffington Post reports that "One of Rahm Emanuel's assistants, Jim Messina, even praised the Department of Agriculture for dispatching with Ms. Sherrod quickly, as if it were a sign of smart media management, instead of total cowardice in the face of an unsubstantiated rumor perpetrated by an untrustworthy source."