WASHINGTON – US agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack has apologised to the black US department of agriculture (USDA) employee he fired after a furore over an edited videotape of remarks she made in a March speech, saying he “did not handle this situation well”.
Mr Vilsack said yesterday he phoned Shirley Sherrod to extend “my personal and profound apologies” and that he took full responsibility for the turmoil caused when he demanded her resignation without fully investigating the circumstances.
He also extended a job offer to Ms Sherrod (62), who had been the agency’s director of rural development for Georgia. “This is a good woman; she’s been put through hell,” Mr Vilsack said at a news conference in Washington. “I could have done and should have done a better job.”
US president Barack Obama’s chief spokesman, Robert Gibbs, earlier issued an apology on behalf of the administration and said “a disservice” had been done to Ms Sherrod.
The controversy stemmed from a portion of a speech she gave at a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) banquet in March in Georgia. In it, she was telling an anecdote about having an initial meeting with a white farmer who had acted “superior to me”, and as a result she initially didn’t “give him the full force of what I could do” to help him. That clip was highlighted on July 19th by the website biggovzernment.com and was posted on YouTube.
The NAACP, the oldest civil rights organisation in the US, initially condemned her remarks, and Mr Vilsack asked for her resignation that night.
Mr Vilsack said the White House didn’t pressure him to seek Sherrod’s resignation. “This was my decision and I made it in haste,” he said.
“I asked for Shirley’s forgiveness and she was gracious enough to extend it to me.”
The incident she was speaking about occurred in 1986 when she was working for a non-profit agency, not the USDA. In the full version of her speech, she talks about how that experience caused her to realise that the issue was about the “haves and have nots” and not white versus black.
She said she worked hard “calling everybody I could think of” to help the man save his farm, a statement corroborated by the farmer.
After viewing the full video and speaking to Ms Sherrod and the white farmer she mentioned in her remarks, NAACP president and chief executive Benjamin Todd Jealous said in a statement on July 20th that he believed the organization was “snookered” by those who circulated the edited clip.
Eloise Spooner, the wife of the farmer, said in an interview with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Ms Sherrod helped the couple keep their land when they faced bankruptcy in 1986 and that they consider her a “friend for life”.
Posting of the video coincided with the NAACP’s call to leaders of the right-wing Tea Party movement to “repudiate those in their ranks who use racist language in their signs and speeches”.
Mr Vilsack said he offered to re-hire Ms Sherrod at the USDA in a position that would use her “extraordinary” background to assist the agency as it tries to improve its record on race relations. “She asked for the opportunity to think about it,” he said.
Mr Vilsack vowed to rectify the USDA’s history of discrimination claims when he took office last year, a priority he said contributed to the haste of his decision. – (Bloomberg)