Well, as I noted yesterday, it seems the full story is indeed getting out; the following news report is courtesy of the New York Daily News:
“Shirley Sherrod, ex-USDA worker: White House forced me to resign over fabricated racial controversy
BY Aliyah Shahid
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER
Tuesday, July 20th 2010, 2:46 PM
USDA Shirley Sherrod, the former Georgia State Director of Rural Development for the USDA, resigned on Monday after making racial remarks.
One strike and she was out.
A black employee who resigned from the Agriculture Department on Monday said the White House forced her out after remarks that she says have sparked a fabricated racial controversy.
Shirley Sherrod , the former Georgia director of Rural Development, said she received a phone call from the USDA ‘s deputy undersecretary Cheryl Cook on Monday while she was in a car. Cook told her that the White House wanted her to call it quits.
“They called me twice,” Sherrod told the Associated Press . “The last time they asked me to pull over the side of the road and submit my resignation on my Blackberry, and that’s what I did.”
The controversy began after several media organizations posted a 38-second video clip of Sherrod speaking to a local Georgia chapter of the NAACP . She tells the group that she did not give a white farmer “the full force of what I could do” after he asked for assistance.
The video surfaced days after the NAACP quarreled with Tea Party members over allegations of racism.
Sherrod said her statements were taken out of context.
“My point in telling that story is that working with him helped me to see that it wasn’t a black and white issue,” she said. Sherrod added that the episode took place in 1986 before she worked for the Agriculture Department.
Sherrod said that she eventually became friends with the farmer and worked with him for two years to help him avoid foreclosure.
The woman who says she is the wife of the farmer referenced in the clip told CNN Sherrod helped her family save their farm. Eloise Spooner described Sherrod as “getting in there and doing all she could do to help us.”
President of the national NAACP, Benjamin Todd Jealous , supported the resignation, saying the organization has a zero-tolerance policy.
“According to her remarks, she mistreated a white farmer in need of assistance because of his race,” he said in a statement before Sherrod’s explanation.
“We are appalled by her actions, just as we are with abuses of power against farmers of color and female farmers.”
Less than a week ago, I openly questioned the motivation and goal of the NAACP in their rousting up the hornet’s nest that is the Tea Party. I simply did not see what there was to be gained in engaging in such a dustup with the grassroots organization, after all, they’re not responsible for the many problems that beset African Americans. Moreover, given its own rather colorful past, I wasn’t entirely sure the NAACP should have been the ones to take the Tea Party task, if any group should have done so at all.
Well, as I predicted, things have gotten ugly and will only get uglier in the days and weeks to come, as the current “outing” of a videotaped snippet of a public address one Ms. Shirley Sherrod, of the USDA, supposedly made to a local NAACP group. In the NY Daily News piece above, Sherrod makes clear who forced her to resign-it came from the White House itself. Meaning that either Obama came up with the idea, or at the very least he signed off on and/or was aware of it.
What a big mess.
At the risk of sounding like a really badly broken record at this point, I must ask, yet again:
How does any of this help Black people? I mean, we got really big problems that need addressing: we’ve been hit hardest by the recession; we’ve been hit hardest by the subprime mortage crisis; and we’ve been hit hardest by the job losses that have occurred across the country in the last few years.
Why isn’t Obama and/or the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus, or the other umpteen public advocacy groups that claim to speak for and work on behalf of Black Americans, saying anything about any of the above? Why aren’t they on the country’s major news outlets talking about these things? Why aren’t they leading protest marches, sit ins, etc et al with these issues in mind?
Is something wrong here, or is it just me?
Expect to hear more from the Sherrod case. No matter how it eventually shakes itself out, the bottomline is, that the Tea Party has in a very real sense, WON. All the NAACP has gotten out of this, is dirty.
Damn.
Comment & reply, holla.
The Obsidian
