A dedicated life: Shirley Sherrod's ongoing battle for racial cooperation in Georgia.

AuthorCooper, Ryan

Almost three years ago, in late March 2010, Shirley Sherrod, who was then the USDA state director of rural development for Georgia, gave a forthright speech about her life story at an NAACP banquet. She told of how a white sheriff had lynched her cousin in 1943, how her father was killed by a white neighbor who went uncharged despite three witnesses, and how after her father's death she dedicated herself to staying in Georgia to work for change. Initially, she said, her commitment was limited to the black community, but in 1985, her mind was changed.

That year, while Sherrod was working for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, a nonprofit helping black farmers hang on to their land, Roger Spooner, a white farmer in danger of foreclosure, approached her for help. She took Spooner to a white lawyer, assuming that one of his "own kind would take care of him." But when she discovered that the lawyer would do nothing for him, she did what she could instead. Eventually, she helped Spooner to keep his farm. This was a lesson from God, Sherrod said during her NAACP speech, to teach her that it's not all about black and white, but about poverty also. "Working with him made me see that it's really about those who have versus those who don't," she said.

Andrew Breitbart, the late conservative provocateur, published a video of that speech several months later. His version had been heavily edited to remove the context and ending, making Sherrod sound as if she were baldly discriminating against a white man because of his race. Although Breitbart's reputation as a dissembler was well known, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack panicked after the video went viral. Sherrod's supervisor called her later that day while she was driving home and asked her to pull over and type her resignation on her BlackBerry. Even the NAACP denounced her without watching the tape of its own event.

The next day, the truth came out. Spooner's wife defended Sherrod on CNN, launching a fun media firestorm. Vilsack called Sherrod to apologize and later offered her a high-level advocacy job in the USDA. (Sherrod felt this was a "backhanded apology" and refused the new post.) The president himself called as well to smooth things over.

To Sherrod, all that's old news. These days, she has returned to the work she was doing before all the publicity. She still lives with her husband, Charles, in Albany, Georgia, where they raised their children and where she still spends her days...

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