Shirley Sherrod will sue Andrew Breitbart

See all Shirley Sherrod posts.

This should be an interesting case. I think Sherrod will win. Andrew Breitbart intentionally doctored a video to make it look like she was saying the exact opposite of what she really was saying. This seems to be a hobby of Breitbart, who apparently does not find support for his positions in the real world, so he constructs fake evidence to back up his beliefs.

Obama urges a dialogue on race after Sherrod case
July 29, 2010
By Mimi Hall
USA TODAY

President Obama said Thursday that all Americans should spend more time talking about a sensitive subject that he has addressed only sparingly since he took office: race.

In a speech to the National Urban League and on the ABC daytime talk show The View, the president talked about race relations in the context of the controversy surrounding the recent firing of Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod.

Sherrod's own comments about race were misconstrued after a snippet of a 43-minute speech she gave to the NAACP was posted last week on the conservative blog biggovernment.com. The clip made Sherrod, who is black, appear racist as she recounted a time when she purposefully didn't give a white farmer the help he needed. The whole speech reveals that she was using the anecdote as part of a broader story about racial reconciliation.

They day after she was fired, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack apologized for taking action based on just the edited video and offered Sherrod her job back. She has not said whether she'll take it. She announced Thursday that she will sue the blogger, Andrew Breitbart, who posted the video...



Race isn't the problem -- economic inequality is
Shirley Sherrod says the social war is about money, not race.
Associated Press
By Michelle Singletary
July 25, 2010

Instead of focusing on the politics behind the firing and subsequent redemption of Agriculture Department employee Shirley Sherrod, we should consider what she was trying to tell us when she addressed the NAACP.

Sherrod became the latest hot-topic story after a conservative blogger posted a video that was edited to make it appear she went out of her way to not offer help to a white farmer when she worked for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives Land Assistance Fund decades ago. Sherrod was summarily asked to resign and then, in a New York minute, was vindicated when the full video of her speech revealed she had been instrumental in saving the man's farm.

Given her work and experience, we need to hear Sherrod out.

There is a disturbing and widening gulf between the rich and the poor in America. And it would be even wider except for the fact that so many middle-income families have borrowed their way to a comfortable lifestyle. They are just a paycheck, a divorce or a heath crisis away from financial ruin.

Sherrod said that while working with the white farmer, she realized that the social war we've been having isn't about race but economic inequity.

"Y'all, it's about poor versus those who have," Sherrod said in her speech. "It's really about those who have versus those who don't, you know. And they could be black; and they could be white; they could be Hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people -- those who don't have access the way others have."
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Over the past several decades, more and more Americans have come to this realization. The number of people who believe they are among the have-nots has doubled from 17 percent in 1988 to 34 percent in 2007, according to a report by the Pew Research Center. The economic data back up this perception. Income gains over the past few decades have been heavily concentrated at the very top of the economic ladder...

Agriculture Dept woman was fired for promoting racial reconciliation

Conservative bloggers went after her with a distorted story, and Democrats caved in to the pressure.

Discrimination against black farmers (Look for the discrimination video by scrolling in the "recommended" window at top right.)

WH apologizes to fired Ag worker; she mulls return
By MARY CLARE JALONICK and BEN EVANS
AP
7/21/10

The White House did a sudden about-face Wednesday and begged for forgiveness from the black Agriculture Department employee whose ouster ignited an embarrassing political firestorm over race...

Sherrod said she resigned under White House pressure after the airing of a video of racial remarks she made at an NAACP gathering. But Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said repeatedly on Wednesday that the decision had been his alone.

"I asked for Shirley's forgiveness and she was gracious enough to extend it to me," he said after reaching her by telephone...

It all began with the airing of a video on a conservative website of Sherrod's remarks about not doing all she could to help a white farmer two decades ago. After she was told to resign — with the NAACP declaring its approval — the situation grew more complicated when the rest of the edited video was released by the NAACP and Sherrod insisted her remarks were about reconciliation, not the stoking of racism...


Jul 22, 2010
The civil rights heroism of Charles Sherrod
Andrew Breitbart sure picked the wrong people to symbolize black "racism." Taylor Branch and Clay Carson weigh in
By Joan Walsh
Salon.com

People who care about civil rights and racial reconciliation may eventually thank Andrew Breitbart for bringing Shirley Sherrod the global attention she deserves. Really. Her message of racial healing, her insight that the forces of wealth and injustice have always pit "the haves and the have-nots" against each other, whatever their race, is exactly what's missing in today's Beltway debates about race. What's even more amazing, but almost completely unexplored in this controversy, is the historic civil rights leadership role of her husband, Charles Sherrod, an early leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, who served on the front lines of the nonviolent civil rights movement in the early 1960s.

Despite Breitbart's attempt to cast Shirley Sherrod as The, um, Man ("The Woman" doesn't have the same ring), out to keep oppressed white folk down, under our first black racist president, she turned out to be the opposite, an advocate of justice for everybody. Given that history, it's fascinating to learn more about her husband, an early SNCC leader known for being willing to work with white volunteers even after tension developed over the role of whites in the organization. Charles Sherrod is important for much more than the fairness with which he treated whites, but given Breitbart's attempt to make his wife the poster woman for black "racism," that footnote to his leadership history is particularly noteworthy...