Monday, July 19, 2010

Breaking ... Sudden resignation of USDA's Shirley Sherrod after video surfaces of comments at NAACP banquet

Breaking ... Shirley Sherrod of the USDA has resigned after comments made at an NAACP banquet. This comes after the NAACP issued a statement last week accusing tea party members of being racist.

Andrew Breitbart at BigGovernment.com broke the shocking video of Shirley Sherrod, USDA Rural Development Georgia State Director, where her comments indicated race played into her professional decisions at the USDA.

From WCBS TV-2:
"The first time I was faced with having to help a white farmer save his farm, he took a long time talking but he was trying to show me he was superior to me. I know what he was doing, but he had come to me for help. 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," Sherrod said.

"I was struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farmland, 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," Sherrod said. "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."

In the video, Sherrod also spoke of referring the white farmer to a white lawyer, thinking the latter would be more sympathetic because of race. "So I took him to a white lawyer that had attended some of training that we had provided because Chapter 12 bankruptcy had just been enacted for the family farm. So I figured if I take him to one of them, that his own kind would take care of him."
Tonight Fox News is talking about the resignation and the fact it took the new media in the form of Andrew Breitbart to expose this video and its implications. Apparently the banquet took place in March 2010 ... will this explosive story make the rounds of the mainstream media now?

Update: More news on this story from The Other McCain.

1 comment:

Gregory Stewart said...

So, have updated your blog since the initial resignation? And, what are your thoughts on the apparent controversy?