Ex-worker: USDA 'wasn't interested in hearing the truth' - CNN.com
(CNN) -- A former USDA employee who resigned after a video surfaced of her talking about a white farmer told CNN on Tuesday that the administration "wasn't interested in hearing the truth."
Shirley Sherrod, who resigned Monday as the department's state director of rural development for Georgia, told CNN she had four calls telling her the White House wanted her to resign. She said she was driving at the time, and the last call asked her to pull to the side of the road and offer her resignation.
Sherrod's resignation came after media outlets aired the video, in which she tells and audience she did not give the white farmer "the full force of what I could do" to help him avoid foreclosure.
Sherrod told CNN on Tuesday the incident she discusses in the clip took place more than two decades ago, and she recounted it to an audience to make the point that people should move beyond race.
"I was telling the story of how working with him helped me to see the issue is not about race," she said. "It's about those who have versus those who do not have."
Sherrod said Tuesday that her remarks were taken out of context.
"I was speaking to that group, like I've done many groups, and I tell them about a time when I thought the issue was race and race only," Sherrod said on CNN's "American Morning" from her home in Albany, Georgia. The incident took place in 1986, while she worked for a nonprofit and before she joined the Agriculture Department, she said.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People issued a statement applauding her resignation.
"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," Benjamin Todd Jealous, NAACP president and CEO, said in the statement. "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 said. "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 it was unfortunate the NAACP would make a statement without checking to see what happened.
"That 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 in the NAACP," Sherrod said. "They need to learn something about me. They need to know what I've contributed over the years."
Video: USDA worker resigns for remark
A Georgia woman who said she believes her husband is the farmer referenced in the clip told CNN on Tuesday that Sherrod was helpful to her family and that the couple never felt she was being racist while trying to assist them in avoiding foreclosure.
"She treated us really good and got us all we could," said Eloise Spooner of Iron City, Georgia. Spooner said she remembered that Sherrod helped find an attorney to help her husband, Roger.
She said she doesn't believe Sherrod is being treated fairly.
Conservative website publisher Andrew Breitbart originally posted the video, which was quickly picked up by Fox News. The video claims Sherrod's remarks were delivered March 27 to an NAACP Freedom Fund banquet, but it is not clear whether that is the case, nor is it clear where the event was or how many people attended.
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.
Sherrod mentioned that the lawyer would help the farmer with a bankruptcy filing but did not say in the clip whether his farm was saved.
She told CNN that at the time, she was working with a nonprofit association aimed at assisting farmers in Georgia and the Southeast. In the end, she said, the lawyer did not help the farmer and she "had to frantically find a lawyer who would file a Chapter 11 to stop the foreclosure.
Sherrod said she wound up being friends with the farmer and his wife.
She said she tried to explain her speech to USDA officials, "but for some reason, the stuff Fox and the Tea Party does is scaring the administration. I told them to get the whole tape and look at the whole tape and see how I tell people we have to get beyond race and work together."
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said Monday that the department has a zero tolerance policy.
"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," Vilsack said.
CNN's Tristan Smith contributed to this report.
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