Former Agriculture Department employee, who resigned after a video clip surfaced of her discussing a white farmer, insisted Tuesday she “went all out” to help the man keep his farm and said she resigned under pressure from the Obama administration.
Shirley Sherrod, who resigned Monday as the department’s director of rural development for Georgia, told the media she had four calls telling her the White House wanted her to resign.
“They asked me to resign, and in fact they harassed me as I was driving back to the state office from West Point, Georgia, yesterday,” she said. The last call “asked me to pull to the side of the road and do it [resign],” she said.
“I don’t feel good about it, because I know I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said. “… During my time at USDA, I gave it all I had.”
Her resignation came after media outlets aired the video, in which Sherrod, speaking to an audience, said she did not give the white farmer “the full force of what I could do” to help him avoid foreclosure.
She said Tuesday that those remarks were taken out of context and that the 1986 incident, which occurred before she started work for the USDA and was working at a nonprofit, helped her learn to move beyond race. She tells the story to audiences to make that point, she said.
Meanwhile, the wife of the white farmer referenced in the clip told the media she credits Sherrod with helping her family save their farm. Eloise Spooner remembered Sherrod as “getting in there and doing all she could do to help us.”
She said that when she saw the story of the tape and Sherrod’s resignation on television, “I said, ‘That ain’t right. They have not treated her right.’ ”
And the NAACP, which in a statement Monday called Sherrod’s actions “shameful,” said in a second statement Tuesday it was investigating “the recent revelations about the situation” and was attempting to speak with Sherrod and the farmer, as well as view the full video. The organization said it would speak further “following a full and comprehensive process.”
Conservative website publisher Andrew Breitbart originally posted the video, which was quickly picked up by Fox News. The video says Sherrod’s remarks were delivered March 27 to an NAACP Freedom Fund banquet, but it is not clear that is the case, nor is it clear where the event was held or how many people were in attendance.
The poor-quality video shows Sherrod telling her audience that the farmer she was working with “took a long time … trying to show me he was superior to me.” As a result, she said, she “didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough.”
To prove she had done her job, she said, she took him to a white lawyer. “I figured that if I take him to one of them, that his own kind would take care of him,” she said.
But that lawyer failed to help, she said. “I did not discriminate against [the farmer]. And, in fact, I went all out to frantically look for a lawyer at the last minute because the first lawyer we went to was not doing anything to really help him. In fact, that lawyer suggested they should just let the farm go.” She was able to find an attorney to file Chapter 11 bankruptcy to help the family stay on the farm, she said.
Eloise Spooner said that later, “after things kind of settled down,” she brought Sherrod some tomatoes out of her garden, and they “had a good visit.”
Sherrod told the media that she got four calls Monday from Cheryl Cook, USDA rural development undersecretary. In the first, she said, she was told she was being put on administrative leave. In the second, she said, she was told she needed to resign.
Asked if she felt she had an opportunity to explain, Sherrod said, “No, I didn’t. The administration, they were not interested in hearing the truth. No one wanted to hear the truth.”
Attempts by the media to reach the administration for comment on the situation were not immediately successful Tuesday.
Roger Spooner was the first white farmer who had come to her for help, Sherrod told to the media on Tuesday. His land was being sold, and had in fact already been rented out from under him, she recalled.
Sherrod acknowledged that at first, she felt that Roger Spooner had a superior attitude toward her, but “certainly I didn’t act upon it. You know, I’m from the South. I’ve lived in the South all my life, and I know how black people were treated by white people during those years. My own father was murdered by one. I didn’t let that get in the way of trying to help.”
“I didn’t discriminate,” she said. “If I had discriminated against him, I would not have given him any help at all because I wasn’t obligated to do it by anyone … I didn’t have to help that farmer. I could have sent him out the door without giving him any help at all. But in the end, we became very good friends, and that friendship lasted for some years.” In addition, she said, she went on to help “hundreds” more white farmers.
She explained the “full force” remark by saying that she didn’t know what to do to help Spooner. With black farmers, she could rally other farmers to support them, but “I didn’t know of any black farmers who would come out and try to support a white farmer at that point. … I wasn’t really sure of what I could do because at that time, I thought they [white people] had the advantages. I learned that was not the case.”
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said Monday he had accepted Sherrod’s resignation.
“There is zero tolerance for discrimination at USDA, and I strongly condemn any act of discrimination against any person,” Vilsack said. “We have been working hard through the past 18 months to reverse the checkered civil rights history at the department and take the issue of fairness and equality very seriously.”
Sherrod said she assumes there is, in fact, zero tolerance at the USDA for discrimination. “I know I didn’t discriminate, and I made it very clear to the staff there at USDA that it wouldn’t be tolerated during my tenure,” she said. “I said it over and over again.”
The statement that the NAACP issued late Monday backed Vilsack’s decision.
“Racism is about the abuse of power. Sherrod had it in her position at USDA. According to her remarks, she mistreated a white farmer in need of assistance because of his race,” said Benjamin Todd Jealous, president and CEO of the civil rights group. “We are appalled by her actions, just as we are with abuses of power against farmers of color and female farmers.”
“Her actions were shameful,” Jealous continued. “While she went on to explain in the story that she ultimately realized her mistake, as well as the common predicament of working people of all races, she gave no indication she had attempted to right the wrong she had done to this man.”
Sherrod said the NAACP has never contacted her. The statement, she said, “hurts. Because if you look at my history … I’ve done more to advance the causes of civil rights in this area than some of them who are sitting in those positions now at the NAACP. They need to learn something about me. They need to know about my work. They need to know what I’ve contributed through the years.”
She said she tells the story to emphasize looking beyond race. “I’ve said to audiences here, not just that one — in fact, I spoke at a housing conference in a county just south of here, and I said, ‘Look, we need to get beyond the Civil War.’ I tell them there are good things about history from the white side and good things about history and culture from the black side. People love to come into this part of the state to see that. I tell them, ‘We need to make the most of it, and if we work together, we can do that.’ ”
Conservative media outlets tied the video to the NAACP’s recent resolution calling on the Tea Party movement to repudiate racist elements within it that have displayed such items as images of President Obama with a bone through his nose and the White House with a lawn full of watermelons. The controversy has led one Tea Party group to oust another because of a blog posting by the second group’s leader.
Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams posted on his blog a faux letter from Jealous to President Abraham Lincoln in which Williams ridicules the organization’s use of “colored” in its historic name and uses multiple stereotypes to bolster his point. The National Tea Party Foundation expelled Williams’ organization from its coalition as a result.
Sherrod on Tuesday called the NAACP “the reason why this happened. They got into a fight with the Tea Party, and all of this came out as a result of that.”
