USDA official says White House forced her out as NAACP backtracks from its condemnation

A Department of Agriculture official who was forced to resign Monday over racially tinged comments accused the White House of pushing her out before they had fully understood her comments or even seen them in their full context, as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People withdrew their condemnation of the woman and called on the administration to reconsider her firing.

President Obama, however, on Tuesday evening stood by the decision to force out Shirley Sherrod, the USDA official in question, the White House told The Daily Caller.

White House officials told The Daily Caller that they were made aware late in the day Monday by USDA officials that comments by Sherrod, where she talked about discriminating against a white farmer seeking her help to a mostly black audience at an NAACP event in Georgia, had been posted online on a conservative website, BigGovernment.com (see the original shortened video and the full Sherrod speech at the bottom of this story).

President Obama himself was informed of the situation, a White House official said. But the official, speaking about the sensitive issue on the grounds that he not be identified, said that the administration put no pressure on Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to oust Sherrod, and that it was his decision alone.

Vilsack corraborated the story, saying “I made this decision. It’s my decision.”

“Nobody from the White House contacted me about this at all,” Vilsack told CNN.

Sherrod said that she was told differently by Cheryl Cook, the USDA official who called her four times late Monday, first informing her that she had been placed on administrative leave and finally asking Sherrod to pull her car over to the side of the road so she could e-mail in a statement of resignation.

“I had at least three calls telling me the White House wanted me to resign. And the last one asked me to pull over to the side of the road and do it. And that’s exactly what I did,” Sherrod said on CNN. “Each time she said it she said ‘the White House.’”

Sherrod went to the airwaves Tuesday to defend herself and her comments, arguing that in the video that appeared online she was telling a story about racial prejudice in which she had acted wrongly and learned from it, and that the incident in question had taken place in 1986. She was not working for the federal government at the time, she said. And on CNN, Sherrod said that people who had interpreted her comments to be racist were themselves racist.

“I know now that there are racist people out there who would take it to try to mean something else,” Sherrod said. “I grew up in racism and had to fight it all of my life. That’s why I fight so much against it. That’s why I know that racism is not something that’s a part of me.”