WASHINGTON (AP) — The Obama administration on Wednesday was scrambling to defuse a new racial furor, this one stemming from a video posted by a conservative Web site.
The administration dismissed a black U.S. Agriculture Department official after video excerpts were posted in which she appeared to acknowledge using race as a reason for not giving a white farmer as much help as she could have 24 years ago when she worked for a private organization.
But the full video indicated those remarks were taken out of context and led to fresh calls for the reinstatement of the employee, Shirley Sherrod.
The incident is the latest in a series of race-related issues that have garnered national attention since Obama took office as America’s first black president.
Sherrod’s dismissal has been the talk of cable news shows and has been debated on liberal and conservative blogs.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson, a prominent civil rights leader, called on the administration Wednesday to apologize for Sherrod’s treatment.
He said the case is even "more egregious" than last year’s controversy, in which Obama criticized a white police officer for his arrest of black Harvard University scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.
That uproar led to a widely publicized "beer summit," in which Obama invited Gates and the officer, Sgt. James Crowley, to the White House.
The latest incident stems from remarks Sherrod made in March at a banquet of a local chapter of the NAACP, a major civil rights organization.
In the two-minute, 38-second clip posted Monday by BigGovernment.com, Sherrod described the first time a white farmer came to her for help. It was 1986, and she worked for a rural farm aid group. She said the farmer came in acting "superior" to her and she debated how much help to give him.
Initially, she said, "I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do" and only gave him enough help to keep his case progressing. Eventually, she said, his situation "opened my eyes" that whites were struggling just like blacks, and helping farmers wasn’t so much about race but was "about the poor versus those who have."
The video immediately caused an uproar and led to her condemnation by the NAACP. She was pressured by superiors to resign her position as the Agriculture Department’s director of rural development in the southern state of Georgia.
Sherrod said her remarks were part of a larger story about learning from her mistakes and racial reconciliation, not racism. She said they were taken out of context by bloggers who posted only part of her speech.
The NAACP, after posting the full video of Sherrod’s remarks, said it had been duped by the conservative website and that she should keep her job.
The White House called the Agriculture Department Tuesday night after more information about Sherrod’s remarks emerged, a White House official said. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the call, said the White House and the department agreed that the case should be reviewed based on the new evidence.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said Wednesday he would reconsider the department’s decision to oust her.
But Sherrod said she does not know if she would return to her job, even if asked. "I am just not sure how I would be treated there," she said.
She said later in another broadcast interview that she might consider returning if she had the chance, saying she has received encouraging calls, including one from the NAACP.
The administration’s move to reconsider her employment was an absolute reversal from hours earlier, when the White House official said that Obama had been briefed on Sherrod’s resignation after the fact and stood by the Agriculture Department’s handling of it.
But growing calls for the administration to reconsider the decision put pressure on Vilsack, who stressed that the decision to ask for her resignation was his alone.
The white farming family that was the subject of the story stood by Sherrod and said she should stay.
"We probably wouldn’t have (our farm) today if it hadn’t been for her leading us in the right direction," said Eloise Spooner, the wife of farmer Roger Spooner. "I wish she could get her job back because she was good to us, I tell you."
