Shirley Sherrod, Georgia Director of Rural Development publicly declared that she engaged in racial discrimination at the NAACP Freedom Fund dinner in Georgia. You can watch the video that BigGovernment.com posted below:
A transcript of what Ms. Sherrod said:
He had to 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," she said. "I was struggling with the fact that so many black people have 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.
One has to wonder about the environment that Sherrod found herself in that she thought she could admit to something like this publicly and get away with it. Was she emboldened by things she saw within the Administration or is she just being stupid?
Perhaps she’s just being stupid as she is getting thrown under the bus.
Fox News reports that when the video surfaced, Sherrod resigned:
The Agriculture Department announced Monday, shortly after FoxNews.com published its initial report on the video, that Sherrod had resigned.
"There is zero tolerance for discrimination at USDA, and I strongly condemn any act of discrimination against any person," Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a written statement. "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.
BigGovernment.com also posted a second clip of her encouraging blacks to apply for work within the USDA because they won’t get fired. Apparently though if you admit to racial discrimination and there is video proof all bets are off. I wonder if my former governor now Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack asked for her resignation or if she just offered it up. Oh to be a fly on the wall. If there wasn’t video proof I wonder what would have happened. You can watch the second clip below:
There is some indication that this may be the first video of several from NAACP events. Andrew Breitbart’s always good for stretching these things out (remember the ACORN investigation?).
HT: The Other McCain
