Remembering CBS' 'Harvest of Shame' documenting migrant workers in Belle Glade

Editor's note: This story from the Post archives was originally published in 2020.

Readers: This week marks the 60th anniversary of the groundbreaking CBS documentary "Harvest of Shame". Here’s more from our archives.

Few documentaries have unleashed such strong feelings in America as Harvest of Shame did when it aired on Thanksgiving Day in 1960.

"Never before in the dismal history of migratory farm labor in the United States has there been such widespread personal knowledge as there is today of the shocking conditions under which the migrants live and work," The New York Times wrote in an editorial.

“Shame“ began in Belle Glade and followed migrant workers on their trek to fields and orchards across the country.

Relying heavily on interviews with workers and their children, it focused attention on low wages, poor housing and grueling work that kept migrant families locked in a poverty cycle that contrasted sharply with the prosperity of their employers.

“Shame“ was saluted by advocates for change and denounced by farmers and their lobbyists. U.S. Sen. Spessard Holland of Florida called it inaccurate and unfair.

Edward R. Murrow showed the life of people who work in what he called "the sweatshop of the soil."

He concluded, "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."

It was unusual for television to make such a direct appeal to the viewer.

"It was editorializing, but Murrow felt strongly about it," Fred Friendly, the executive producer, said (in 1990; he died in 1998). "Not to have done it would have been an abdication of responsibility, and we were proud that we did it."

“Shame“ tells a broader story than that of the migrant farmworker of 1960, Friendly, said; it is really about all the disenfranchised in America.

Did anything improve? Ten years later, as we mentioned in our April 30 column, The Palm Beach Post won its only Pulitzer Prize for heartbreaking photos of conditions in ...the Glades.

In the half century that’s followed, the farm industry says it’s made great strides in farmworkers’ conditions. But no one disputes it’s backbreaking labor many people take for granted.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Remembering CBS' 'Harvest of Shame' documenting migrant workers in Belle Glade