SNOOKERED!

Ricardo Lewis
Associate Editor

The controversy surrounding the unwarranted forced resignation of Shirley Sherrod has shaken the beehive of racial controversy in America. Sherrod resigned from her federal job with the U.S. Department of Agriculture after snippets of a speech she gave at a local NAACP freedom fund banquet in March were published on the Internet. The website, biggovernment. com, posted a heavily edited version of the speech that Sherrod gave. Biggovernment.com is the same website that published video footage of ACORN workers counseling actors who were posing as pimps and prostitutes.

In the video posted on the website, Sherrod tells the story of how she was hesitant to help a white farmer who sought her help 24 years earlier when she was an employee for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives. The organization is a nonprofit group that helps family farmers. FoxNews.com published a story about the video which caused a fury of hasty activity in a matter of hours that threw Sherrod in a whirlwind of controversy.

The NAACP issued a statement calling Sherrod’s comments “shameful,” even though she had given the speech at one of their branch functions. Sherrod received phone calls from several USDA officials. In one of those calls USDA Undersecretary, Cheryl Cook, asked Sherrod to send her resignation via her Blackberry.

“The irony of this is you have one black woman who said she didn’t give white people her best and it shakes up the world,” said Leon County Commissioner Bill Proctor. “This is a testament to how hard and how loyal our women have been.” The Secretary of the USDA., Tom Vilsack, after viewing the entire speech, has since apologized to Sherrod and offered her a job with the agency. At press time, Sherrod said that she is considering the offer.

“Sometimes you can rush to justice, but I think that the situation was taken care of as quickly as it possibly could. I believe that the ones who put it out there, they did not have good intentions,” said Ernest Ferrell, president of the Tallahassee Urban League. “It seems to be the prevailing attitude among some that whatever can be stirred up to divide us, they are going to stir it up,” Ferrell continued.

Benjamin Jealous, president and CEO of the NAACP, issued a statement in the wake of the controversy apologizing for rushing to judgment and saying that the organization was “snookered” by FoxNews into believing that Sherrod’s comments had racial intentions.

“I think the lesson that was learned in all of this is that some folks who work with the media can be deceitful,” said Dale Landry, president of the Tallahassee chapter of the NAACP. Landry stated that the controversy was just part of what is a much larger issue between Tea Party affiliates and the NAACP. He noted that since the NAACP has asked the Tea Party to disassociate themselves with elements that represent white supremacy, there has been an attack on the NAACP.

“This whole issue has impacted us here locally,” Landry said. Jealous stated in an interview on the Rachel Maddow show that since the NAACP has questioned racially divisive ideas of the Tea Party, the NAACP has received hundreds of death threats.

“Someone was just picked up today in Florida for saying that they were a Klansman and threatening the lives of NAACP members,” Jealous said during the interview with Maddow which aired on July 20.