USDA Employee Resigns Over 'Racist' Video

An Agriculture Department employee has been forced to resign over an old video in which she says she didn’t do all she could to help a white farmer, because he was white. In the video, which first appeared on Andrew Breitbart’s Big Government, Shirley Sherrod, the director of rural development for Georgia, is seen speaking before an NAACP rally. She says she’d decided not to give a white farmer “the full force of what I could do to help him.”

The video quickly appeared on Fox News, and Sherrod resigned yesterday. But she tells CNN the comments were taken out of context. In the video, she explains that she took the farmer to a white lawyer, assuming “his own kind would take care of him.” But the lawyer didn’t help, Sherrod tells CNN, and the moral of the story was that “the issue is not about race. It’s about those who have versus those who don’t.” She says she wound up befriending the farmer. (More Shirley Sherrod stories.)