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Sherrod said Thursday she plans to file a lawsuit against Andrew Breitbart, the conservative blogger who posted a video that was edited to make her appear racist.
Speaking Thursday at the National Association of Black Journalists convention, Sherrod said she would definitely sue over the video that took her remarks to a local NAACP group out of context. Sherrod said she had not received an apology from Breitbart and no longer wanted one. “He had to know that he was targeting me,” she said.
Breitbart had yet to respond at press time. In past interviews, he claimed to have posted the portion of the speech where she expresses reservations about helping a white farmer to prove that racism exists in the NAACP, which had just demanded that the tea party movement renounce any bigoted elements. The farmer came forward after Sherrod resigned, saying she ended up helping save his farm.
Vilsack and President Barack Obama later called Sherrod to apologize. Obama said Thursday that Sherrod “deserves better than what happened last week.”
Addressing the National Urban League this morning, he said the full story Sherrod was trying to tell “is exactly the kind of story we need to hear in America.” On ”The View” this morning, Obama pinned part of Sherrod’s hasty removal on a media culture that he said seeks out conflict and doesn’t always get the facts right. But he added, “A lot of people overreacted, including people in my administration.”
At the NABJ convention, Sherrod was asked what could be done to ensure accurate coverage as conservatives like Breitbart attack the NAACP and other liberal groups.
Andrew Breitbart
Sherrod, 62, responded that members of her generation who were in the civil rights movement “tried too much to shield that hurt and pain from younger people. We have to do a better job of helping those individuals who get these positions, in the media, in educational institutions, in the presidency, we have to make sure they understand the history so they can do a better job.”
She said Obama is one of those who need a history lesson.
“That’s why I invited him to southwest Georgia. I need to take him around and show him some of that history,” Sherrod said.
Sherrod said the description of the new job she has been offered in the office of advocacy and outreach was a “draft,” and she questioned whether any money had been budgeted for its programs.
“I have many, many questions before I can make a decision,” she said.
Despite her experience, Sherrod said she believes the country can heal its racial divisions – if people are willing to confront the issue.
“Young African-Americans, young whites, too, we’ve done such a job of trying to be mainstream that we push things under the rug that we need to talk about. And then we get to situations like this,” she said.
“I truly believe that we can come together in this country. But you don’t (come together) by not talking to each other. You don’t get there by pushing things under the rug.”
Sherrod said her faulty firing should not be blamed on all media.
Before the full video was released, Fox News host Bill O’Reilly said Sherrod should be fired, and others called her speech racist. O’Reilly later apologized.
“They had a chance to get the facts out, and they weren’t interested,” Sherrod said.
She said she declined to give Fox an interview because she believed they were not interested in pursuing the truth. “They would have twisted it,” she said.
The NAACP has retracted its original statement condemning comments made by a former Agriculture Department official who resigned after a video clip surfaced of her discussing a white farmer.
The NAACP said in a statement Tuesday that it was “snookered by Fox News” and conservative website publisher Andrew Breitbart.
“Having reviewed the full tape by Shirley Sherrod, who is the woman who was fired by the Department of Agriculture, and most importantly heard the testimony of the white farmers mentioned in this story, we now believe that the organization that edited the documents did so with the intention of deceiving millions of Americans,” the statement from NAACP President Benjamin Jealous said.
Jealous later posted on his Twitter account that he “Spoke to Ms. Sherrod earlier today and personally apologized. Plan to meet with her face-to-face the next time I’m in Georgia.”
The organization also urged Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to reconsider Sherrod’s resignation from her post as the department’s director of rural development for Georgia.
Breitbart originally posted the video, which was quickly picked up by Fox News.
In the video, Sherrod can be heard telling an audience at a March 27, 2010, appearance before a local chapter of the NAACP that she had not given a white farmer “the full force of what I could do” to help him save the family farm.
Conservative media outlets tied the video to the NAACP’s recent resolution calling on the Tea Party movement to repudiate racist elements within it that have displayed such items as images of President Obama with a bone through his nose and the White House with a lawn full of watermelons. The controversy has led one Tea Party group to oust another because of a blog posting by the second group’s leader.
Tea Party Express leader Mark Williams posted on his blog a faux letter from Jealous to President Abraham Lincoln in which Williams ridicules the organization’s use of “colored” in its historic name and uses multiple stereotypes to bolster his point. The National Tea Party Foundation expelled Williams’ organization from its coalition as a result.
Breitbart told CNN’s “John King USA” on Tuesday that releasing the video was “not about Shirley Sherrod.”
“This was about the NAACP attacking the Tea Party, and this is showing racism at an NAACP event,” he said. “I did not ask for Shirley Sherrod to be fired.”
Sherrod defended herself in a number of interviews Tuesday, saying her controversial comments were taken out of context. She had, she said, used a personal experience from nearly a quarter century ago in which she confronted her own racism and learned to move beyond it.
She insisted she “went all out” to help the man keep his farm and said she resigned only under pressure from the Obama administration, telling CNN she received four phone calls Monday telling her the White House wanted her to step down.
“They asked me to resign, and in fact they harassed me as I was driving back to the state office from West Point, Georgia, yesterday,” she said. The last call “asked me to pull to the side of the road and do it [resign],” she said.