A conservative website posted video of Sherrod’s remarks, causing a furor which led to her condemnation by the NAACP and her ouster by Vilsack. Until Tuesday, she was the Agriculture Department’s director of rural development in Georgia. Then, she said, she was pressured by superiors to resign.

Sherrod said her remarks, delivered in March at a local NAACP banquet in Georgia, were part of a larger story about learning from her mistakes and racial reconciliation, not racism, and said they were taken out of context by bloggers who posted only part of her speech.

Vilsack’s statement came after the NAACP posted the full video of Sherrod’s comments Tuesday night.

“I am of course willing and will conduct a thorough review and consider additional facts to ensure to the American people we are providing services in a fair and equitable manner,” Vilsack said.

The Obama administration’s move to reconsider her employment was an absolute reversal from hours earlier, when a White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said President Barack Obama had been briefed on Sherrod’s resignation after the fact and stood by the Agriculture Department’s handling of it.

But growing calls for the administration to reconsider the decision put pressure on Vilsack, who stressed that the decision to ask for her resignation was his alone. The NAACP, which initially condemned Sherrod’s remarks and supported her ouster, later said she should keep her job. The civil rights group said it and millions of others were duped by the conservative website that posted partial video of her speech on Monday.

Appearing in a nationally broadcast interview Wednesday morning, Sherrod said she “couldn’t get the people I was working with” to listen to her explanation.

She said the tone of her comments posted on the website were misleading because they lacked context. “That’s not me. If you look at my life’s work, you would know that’s not me.”

“… If they would have looked at the entire tape, I don’t see how they could have come away thinking I was a racist,” she said.

Sherrod said she was “particularly hurt” by the NAACP’s condemnation.

“All of my life has been about civil rights work and fairness,” she said. Asked if she would go back to the department if asked, Sherwood said, “That’s one … I just don’t know at this point.”

The white farming family that was the subject of the story stood by Sherrod and said she should stay.

“We probably wouldn’t have (our farm) today if it hadn’t been for her leading us in the right direction,” said Eloise Spooner, the wife of farmer Roger Spooner of Iron City, Ga. “I wish she could get her job back because she was good to us, I tell you.”

As Sherrod reached out to media to plead her case and more people came to her defense, the administration faced criticism that officials nervous about racial perceptions overreacted to her comments and made her a political sacrifice amid dueling allegations of racism between the NAACP and the tea party movement.

In the clip posted on BigGovernment.com, Sherrod described the first time a white farmer came to her for help. It was 1986, and she worked for a nonprofit rural farm aid group. She said the farmer came in acting “superior” to her and she debated how much help to give him.

“I was struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farmland, and here I was faced with helping a white person save their land,” Sherrod said.

Initially, she said, “I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do” and only gave him enough help to keep his case progressing. Eventually, she said, his situation “opened my eyes” that whites were struggling just like blacks, and helping farmers wasn’t so much about race but was “about the poor versus those who have.”

The two-minute, 38-second clip posted Monday by BigGovernment.com was presented as evidence that the NAACP was hypocritical in its recent resolution condemning what it calls racist elements of the tea party movement. The website’s owner, Andrew Breitbart, said the video shows the civil rights group condoning the same kind of racism it says it wants to erase. Biggovernment.com is the same outfit that gained fame last year after airing video of workers at the community group ACORN counseling actors posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend.

In his original statement on the matter Tuesday morning, Vilsack said he had accepted Sherrod’s resignation and stressed that the department had “zero tolerance for discrimination.” Later in the day, after Sherrod spoke to the media about the intention of her comments, Vilsack sent out a second statement that said the controversy surrounding Sherrod’s comments could, rightly or wrongly, cause people to question her decisions as a federal employee and lead to lingering doubts about civil rights at the agency, which has a troubled history of discrimination.

Sherrod said officials showed no interest in listening to her explanation when she was asked to resign. She said she was on the road Monday when USDA deputy undersecretary Cheryl Cook called her and told her to pull over and submit her resignation on her Blackberry because the White House wanted her out.

“It hurts me that they didn’t even try to attempt to see what is happening here, they didn’t care,” Sherrod said. “I’m not a racist. … Anyone who knows me knows that I’m for fairness.”

———-

Online:

Full video posted by NAACP: http://www.naacp.org/news/entry/video–sherrod

But now that Breitbart’s story of Sherrod being a racist has been exposed as bogus, the White House is trying to have it both ways: They say they support Vilsack’s decision but at the same time had absolutely nothing to do with his making it.

That’s what we were told (the same as other reporters) when we asked the White House about this. “WH did not pressure Sherrod or USDA. It was the Secretary’s decision, as he says,” says a White House official who declined to be named.

That claim differs from Sherrod’s account of things. She told the AP that she was called twice Monday by USDA deputy undersecretary Cheryl Cook, who told her, in the AP’s paraphrase, that “the White House wanted her to resign.”

Either way, the larger truth here is that there’s not much of a meaningful distinction between Vilsack and the White House. It’s all the Obama administration. The administration fired Sherrod, and it’s standing by that decision.

We are in possession of a video from in which Shirley Sherrod, USDA Georgia director of rural development, speaks at the NAACP Freedom Fund dinner in Georgia. In her meandering speech to what appears to be an all-black audience, this federally appointed executive bureaucrat lays out in stark detail that her federal duties are managed through the prism of race and class distinctions.

The speech wasn’t to an all-black audience (though the specter of black people revealing their contempt for whitey in closed-door meetings of fellow black people seems to drive a lot of conservatives into a paranoid frenzy), as the mayor of Douglas, Ga., was among the white attendees. And the story Sherrod told was about her work 24 years ago for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund, not “her federal duties.” So, that’s a lie. Andrew Breitbart is lying in this paragraph. Just for the record. Andrew Breitbart lies.

(The video intro, prepared by God knows who, also says that “Ms. Sherrod admits that in her federally appointed position overseeing a billion dollars … she discriminates against people due to their race.” Again: This is a story from when she worked for an advocacy organization and fund, not the government.)

Here’s the damning story:

“What he didn’t know while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me was, I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him,” she said. “I was struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farmland, and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land. So I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough.”

The Federation of Southern Cooperatives was chartered in 1967 for the express purpose of forming, aiding and developing co-ops for black farmers and landowners. Even now, while it has branched out into helping poor people of any race own their own land, its mission statement reads:

We strive toward the development of self-supporting communities with programs that increase income and enhance other opportunities; and we strive to assist in land retention and development, especially for African Americans, but essentially for all family farmers.

Sherrod belonged to an organization set up during the civil rights era specifically to help black farmers. So, yes, she had some reservations the first time she was approached for help by a white farmer. Then she sent him to a white lawyer for help, because she thought the white lawyer would help one of his own kind. But she learned an important lesson that day: When you’re poor, no one wants to help you, no matter your race!

Because the entire point of Sherrod’s story was to illustrate how her eyes were opened to that fact, she went on in her speech to explain that she “eventually worked with the man over a two-year period to help ward off foreclosure of his farm and … eventually became friends with him and his wife.”

This has been corroborated by the actual discriminated-against white people in question.

But that part isn’t in the clip that Breitbart posted. Because it undermines the entire premise of his post, which is that the NAACP and Barack Obama are racist against white people. (Also because Breitbart says he doesn’t have the entire speech, which makes his very comprehensive-sounding post on the speech even better.)

This is not just a matter of missing the context of Sherrod’s remarks. People are imagining what she actually said based on how Andrew Breitbart framed his obviously edited clip. The content of said clip does not matter. Andrew Breitbart could put up a clip of Jordy singing “Dur dur d’être bébé!” under the headline “VIDEO SHOCK: ACORN RACIST IS OBAMA APPOINTEE” and as long as it included his picture above the text, it would lead to calls for the resignation of HUD Secretary Shaun Donovan.

But in this instance, the cowardliness of the White House cannot be overstated.

U.S. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced Sherrod’s resignation in a statement, saying the department has “zero tolerance” for discrimination. Sherrod told CNN that Cheryl Cook, deputy undersecretary for Rural Development, called her three times on Monday to eventually demand her resignation on behalf of the White House.

Over nothing. Over less than nothing, in fact. Over complete bullshit! Bullshit so obvious that it completely fell apart in less than 24 hours. I expect this sort of behavior from the craven fools at the Washington Post, but from the White House it’s dismaying. And baffling.

Update: The White House says this was all Tom Vilsack’s call. But they stand by it. Of course.  According to Vilsack’s statement, the perception of a controversy, even where non exists, “would create situations where her decisions, rightly or wrongly, would be called into question making it difficult for her to bring jobs to Georgia.” So, that’s pretty much license to make shit up about any low-level federal employee you want canned, I guess.