Shirley Sherrod Forced to Resign from USDA over Race Remarks

Shirley Sherrod Resigns from USDA

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NAACP Bigotry in their ranks

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Shirley Sherrod was forced to resign as Georgia's Director of Rural Development for the US Department of Agriculture. The incident was sparked by Andrew Breitbart posting a snippet from a video of Sherrod speaking at an NAACP banquet.

In the speech, Sherrod is recounting an anecdote in which she was deciding how much to help a white farmer who sought her office's assistance:

"What he didn't know while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me was, I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him. I was struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farm land, and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land.

So I didn't give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough, so that when he... I assumed the Department of Agriculture had sent him to me, either that or the Georgia Department of Agriculture, and he needed to go back and report that I did try to help him."

The the speech took place in 2009. What the video clip does not show, however, is that the incident which Sherrod discusses took place in 1986, before she was a federal employee. Breitbart has yet to actually post the entire video, but the damage has already been done.

Shirley Sherrod told CNN that the USDA did not consult her before forcing her to resign, and that the NAACP has not contacted her at all. Sherrod says that she is being jettisoned because of the ongoing war of words between the NAACP and the Tea Party.

According to Sherrod, the video clip was intended to damage the NAACP, as it was clipped to exclude the rest of the story, in which she worked with that same farmer for the next two years, befriending him and saving his farm from foreclosure.

Apparently, the NAACP has also considered that there may be more to the story than a two-minute Youtube clip, as they have removed their condemnation message from their site. (The original resignation statement URL opens as blank)