After throwing former USDA Official Shirley Sherrod under the bus in response to selectively edited video of a speech she gave at an NAACP event that was released by conservative activist Andrew Breitbert, Sherrod and the organization appear to have reconciled. The NAACP just sent out a mass email attributed to Sherrod in which she says, "That's behind us."
Not long ago, I sat here in my living room in Albany, Georgia for an afternoon of deep conversation with NAACP President Benjamin Jealous. As he has done in public, Ben movingly apologized for the fact that the NAACP was initially hoodwinked by Breitbart and Fox into supporting my removal. I told him what I want to tell you.
That's behind us, and the last thing I want to see happen is for my situation to weaken support for the NAACP. Too many people confronted by racism and poverty count on the NAACP to be there for them, especially those in rural areas who often have nowhere else to turn.
People ask me, "Shirley, how are you getting through all of this?" I tell them that, if they knew what I have lived through, they'd understand that these current challenges aren't about to throw me off course.
When I was 17 years old, my father was murdered by a white man in Baker County, Georgia. There were three witnesses, but the grand jury refused to indict the person responsible. I knew I had to do something in answer to my father's death.
That very night, I made a commitment that I would stay in the South and fight for change.
I have lived true to that commitment for 45 years. I didn't yield when, just months after my father was killed, they came in the middle of the night to burn a cross in front of our house with my mother, four sisters, and the baby brother my father never got to see still inside.
And I'm surely not going to yield because some Tea Party agitator sat at his computer and turned everything I said upside down and inside out.
Emphasis in the original. The NAACP was widely panned for its knee-jerk response to the Breitbart video, which came only shortly after a Tea Party leader was forced out of a larger Tea Party group for writing a racially charged response to the NAACP's resolution calling on the Tea Party to purge its "racist elements." Jealous said they had been "hoodwinked" by the video.
Full text after the jump.
