Now this is interesting
http://www.ajc.com/news/farmers-wife-says-fired-574027.htmlFarmer's wife says fired USDA official helped save their land
By Marcus K. Garner and Christian Boone
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
5:19 p.m. Tuesday, July 20, 2010
The wife of the white farmer allegedly discriminated against by the USDA's rural development director for Georgia said Shirley Sherrod "kept us out of bankruptcy."
Eloise Spooner, 82, awoke Tuesday to discover that Sherrod had lost her job after videotaped comments she made in March at a local NAACP banquet surfaced on the web. Sherrod said a U.S. Department of Agriculture official forced her to resign.
Sherrod, an African-American, told the crowd she didn't do everything she could to help a white farmer whom she said was condescending when he came to her for aid.
"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 in the video, recorded March 27 in Douglas in southeast Georgia.
But Spooner, who considers Sherrod a "friend for life," said the federal official worked tirelessly to help the Iron City couple hold onto their land as they faced bankruptcy back in 1986.
"Her husband told her, ‘You're spending more time with the Spooners than you are with me,' " Spooner told the AJC. "She took probably two or three trips with us to Albany just to help us out."
Spooner spoke to her friend by phone Tuesday morning.
"She's very sad about it," Spooner said. "She told me she was so glad we talked. I just can't believe this is happening to her."
Sherrod's resignation was announced Monday night by U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. Despite the new revelations, the USDA released a statement late Tuesday afternoon defending the decision.
"First, for the past 18 months, we have been working to turn the page on the sordid civil rights record at USDA and this controversy could make it more difficult to move forward on correcting injustices," Vilsack said. "Second, state rural development directors make many decisions and are often called to use their discretion. The controversy surrounding her comments would create situations where her decisions, rightly or wrongly, would be called into question making it difficult for her to bring jobs to Georgia."
Sherrod, in her first interview after the clip surfaced, told the AJC the video was selectively edited. She said the video posted online Monday by biggovernment.com and reported on by FoxNews.com and this newspaper misrepresented the message she was trying to convey.
"For Fox to take a spin on this like they have done, and know it’s not the truth … it’s very upsetting," said Sherrod, 62, who insisted her statements in the video were not racist. "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 noted that few news reports have mentioned that the story she told happened 24 years ago -- before she got the USDA job -- when she worked with the Georgia field office for the Federation of Southern Cooperative/Land Assistance Fund.
"And I went on to work with many more white farmers," she said. "The story helped me realize that race is not the issue, it's about the people who have and the people who don't. When I speak to groups, I try to speak about getting beyond the issue of race."
Andrew Breitbart, who runs biggovernment.com, did not respond to an interview request.
Sherrod accused the USDA of cowering to right-wing media.
"They were just looking at what the Tea Party and what Fox said, and thought it was too [politically] dangerous for them," Sherrod said of her former employer.
The release of Sherrod's statements came a week after the NAACP issued a resolution calling some elements of the National Tea Party racist for comments made against President Barack Obama and African-American congressmen during the health care debate.
Sherrod was appointed to her position in by Obama's administration in July 2009 to manage more than 40 housing, business and community infrastructure and facility programs, and more than $114 billion in federal loans.
The AJC is working to recover the full video footage of Sherrod's speech to the Douglas NAACP. A production company, DCTV3 in Douglas, recorded the event at the local NAACP chapter's request and is waiting for the chapter's permission to release the full speech.
"We broadcast it on cable," Wilkerson said. "Somebody probably picked it up and recorded it, then put it on YouTube. That's probably why the video looks so shabby."
Sherrod said it wouldn't have made any sense for her to espouse racist comments before the NAACP audience.
"There were some white people there. The mayor [of Douglas] was there," Sherrod recalled. "Why would I do something racist if they were there?"
Mayor Jackie Wilson told the AJC she introduced speakers at the banquet but left before Sherrod's speech.
Wilson said she did not hear of any controversy in the weeks following the banquet, adding she was shocked to learn of Sherrod's resignation.
"She's not someone I know extremely well, but I respected her and thought she was doing a good job. And she seemed to be a fair person," said Wilson, who was city manager before becoming mayor 2 1/2 years ago. "I just hate that this kind of thing happened in Douglas."
Eloise Spooner told the AJC she intends to stand up for her friend.
"She helped us and we're going to help them," she said.
--Staff writer Larry Hartstein contributed to this report.
