Accused of racism, Sherrod now fights against it

By Marcus K. Garner

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

As Shirley Sherrod contemplates whether to rejoin the Agriculture Department she was forced out of Monday, she says she and the nation have a larger issue to ponder.

The question of whether she was a racist agent of the federal government, a question raised by an online video that had been edited to suggest as much, may have given her a new cause, Sherrod said.

“We’ve gotta get beyond this black versus white issue and move to a place where we can all work together,” she said. “I was hoping we had gotten beyond a lot of that stuff. But this is telling me that it just got swept under the rug and we have not dealt with it.”

Sherrod, who is black, was asked to resign after footage of her giving a speech at a March NAACP banquet surfaced showing what appeared to be the then-Georgia director of rural development for the USDA admitting to giving sub-par aid to a farmer because he was white.

“I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do,” she said to the banquet guests in the video that was edited down from 43 minutes to roughly two-and-a-half.

It was only at the end of the footagethat Sherrod began to reveal that her interaction with that white farmer led to a change of heart:

“That’s when it was revealed to me that, y'all, it’s about poor versus those who have, and not so much about white — it is about white and black, but it’s not — you know, it opened my eyes.”

Pundits from both ends of the political spectrum this week came to Sherrod’s support and are calling for an effort to truly redress modern racism.

“After decades of racial disharmony, people are realizing there is more to each other than skin color, however hard it may be to see past that,” wrote Erick Erickson, editor-in-chief of RedState.com and a Macon City Council member. "We’re making progress.”

Erickson said Sherrod set an example.

“We should be hopeful for more people willing to realize the world does not revolve around race,” he wrote.

Georgia’s Democratic congressman and civil rights legend John Lewis told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Friday that he was proud of Sherrod, and that he told his old friend as much when they spoke Thursday.

“I told her that she reminded me of another period when brave and courageous black women stood up,” Lewis said by phone from Washington.

He said the episode has given Sherrod an opportunity to help begin some racial healing.

“It’s sad because with the election of Barack Obama, this is a post-racial society,” Lewis said. “We have laid down the burden of race … we don’t wanna talk about it. But she could emerge as someone who could make a lasting difference in the way we face racism.”

Sherrod is no stranger to racism.

She was one of the first black students to integrate schools in Baker County, and met her husband, then-civil rights activist Charles Sherrod when he was one of many men to respond to reports of a cross being burned in her yard.

Together with about a half-dozen southwest Georgia families, the Sherrods were awarded $13 million following the Agriculture Department’s admission of discriminatory practices in the 1997 Pigford class action suit.

She remained in Georgia and began helping farmers because she had committed to do so after the murder of her father 45 years ago by a white man who went unprosecuted in rural Baker County.

“If I can move beyond that, then people who haven’t had these terrible that happened to them ought to be able to move to that,” Sherrod said. “But we’ve got to be able to talk about it.”

So will she take on the expanded role Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack offered her with his apology for after his admitted rush to judgment?

“Right now, I don’t have any plans,” Sherrod said. “When my father was murdered, a negative became a positive. That’s exactly what happened here.”