WASHINGTON — A black employee who resigned from the Agriculture Department over comments at a Georgia NAACP meeting said Tuesday the White House forced her out of her job over a manufactured racial controversy.
Shirley Sherrod said she was on the road Monday after an event in rural Georgia when USDA deputy undersecretary Cheryl Cook called her and told her the White House wanted her to resign. "They called me twice," Sherrod told The Associated Press in an interview. "The last time they asked me to pull over the side of the road and submit my resignation on my Blackberry, and that's what I did."
The controversy began Monday when the conservative website biggovernment.com posted a two-minute, 38-second video clip of Sherrod's remarks to a local NAACP chapter.
In the video, she says the first time a white farmer came in for help, he was acting "superior" to her and that she struggled to decide how much help to provide him when so many black farmers were struggling. She said she didn't give him the full force of help she could have, but gave him enough.
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