50 Years Later, Murrow's "Harvest of Shame" Still Rings True

In 1960, famed journalist Edward R. Murrow produced the documentary film Harvest of Shame, marking the first time a major media outlet highlighted the fact that migrant workers in America's agricultural industry faced situations akin to slavery. Fifty years later, many of Murrow's claims are still true. Will it be another fifty years before we finally make the American agricultural system slavery-free?

In 1960, the men who harvested and processed most of America's food were mostly poor African Americans, many of them only a generation or two removed from the legal slavery of the 19th century. Today, many migrant agricultural workers are Hispanic -- both recent immigrants and citizens from multi-generational families of Americans. But their experiences are much the same. They have few legal protections and therefore are routinely discriminated against, underpaid, and exploited. Fifty years ago, racism kept many African American workers in poverty, making migratory farm work one of their few options. Today, racism and nativism keep Hispanic workers and immigrants in poverty, making them more vulnerable to the abuses of the agricultural industry. And the similarities don't end there.

Murrow's film opens with shots of men being packed into trucks like cattle and driven away to toil in fields for pennies. One farmer watching the scene commented, "we used to own our slaves; now we just rent them." It's a deeply dehumanizing image, and one that makes us indignantly think, "surely in the past fifty years, after civil rights and Cesar Chavez, the people who pick our food are treated with more dignity"? A modern-day slavery museum operated by The Coalition of Immokalee Workers' says otherwise. It occupies a cargo truck identical to one that transported enslaved farmworkers in Florida in 2008. It's a truck uncomfortably similar to the one in Harvest of Shame.

The slavery, debt bondage, abuse, exploitation, and discrimination faced by farmworkers today is not very different at all from the plight of the men Murrow interviewed so long ago. But today, we have tools and resources to fight slavery in the American agricultural industry that Murrow, for all his vision, never dreamed of. We have organizations like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, who are winning real and concrete victories on behalf of farmworkers. We have individuals like Liz Fitzgerald who are using humor and the arts to end slavery in the food system. And we have the power of the Internet and online organizing, which is allowing thousands of people to pressure supermarkets and restaurant chains in their area to change the way they buy food, and thus the way migrant workers are paid and treated.

So while modern-day slavery in agriculture exists today just like it did fifty years ago, now we finally have to power to end it. Ask grocery giants like Kroger and Giant/Stop and Shop to agree to raise farmworker wages and protect them from slavery. Because we're not going to let slavery stay in the agricultural industry for another fifty years. As Edward R. Morrow said when he closed Harvest of Shame,

The migrants have no lobby. Only an enlightened, aroused and perhaps angered public opinion can do anything about the migrants. The people you have seen have the strength to harvest your fruit and vegetables. They do not have the strength to influence legislation. Maybe we do. Good night, and good luck."

Photo credit: trialsanderrors