Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack apologizes to fired employee Shirley Sherrod, and offers her a job opportunity within the department. The offer comes after an embarrassed White House apologized for ousting her over her remarks about race.

HOW THE FLAP UNFOLDED HOW THE FLAP UNFOLDED The events surrounding the dismissal of Shirley Sherrod, the Agriculture Department's director of rural development in Georgia: March 27 Sherrod speaks at an NAACP chapter banquet in Douglas, Ga. Monday The conservative website biggovernment.com posts an edited version of Sherrod's speech. In the clip, she talks about how she didn't initially give a white farmer Roger Spooner all the help she could have in 1986 because he "was trying to show me he was superior to me." At the time, Sherrod worked for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, a non-profit that helps family farmers. The video clip was posted by Andrew Breitbart . FoxNews.com publishes a story about the video. Sherrod said USDA officials contacted her while she was on the road. In one call, Sherrod said, Deputy Undersecretary Cheryl Cook told her the White House wanted her to resign because of the controversy about her remarks. Sherrod said she was told by Cook to send her resignation via her BlackBerry. The NAACP issues a statement calling Sherrod's comments "shameful." Tuesday Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack says he had accepted Sherrod's resignation and issues a statement saying the department has "zero tolerance for discrimination." Sherrod gives an interview to the Associated Press and appears on CNN to discuss her dismissal. She implores people to watch the entire video of her speech to better understand how she came to help Spooner and become his friend. Sherrod tells CNN that the first she had heard of any controversy stemming from her speech was when she received an e-mail on July 15 that taunted her about it. Sherrod says she alerted the USDA about the e-mail. President Obama was briefed about the situation sometime in the late morning. The NAACP releases a statement saying it watched the entire video of Sherrod's remarks and talked with her. The civil rights group says it was "snookered ... into believing (Sherrod) had harmed white farmers because of racial bias" and urges Vilsack to reconsider her termination. In a second statement, Vilsack 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. Wednesday: At 2:07 a.m. ET, the Agriculture Department issues a statement in which Vilsack says he is "willing and will conduct a thorough review and consider additional facts" about Sherrod's dismissal. Sherrod tells NBC's Today show that she's not sure she would take her job back. During his briefing, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs apologizes to Sherrod on behalf of the Obama administration. He says Vilsack is trying to reach out to Sherrod to "talk about their next steps." CNN airs Sherrod saying the Obama administration is "so afraid of the machine the (political) right is driving here. That's why they were so quick to act." Vilsack holds a news conference to announce he has apologized to Sherrod and she has accepted. He says he takes full responsibility for the botched firing and has offered her a job that would take advantage of her "unique experiences" working with farmers in Georgia. She is considering the offer. Enlarge AP photos Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, right, said his haste in firing Shirley Sherrod reflected a desire to improve the civil rights record of a department facing thousands of bias claims by minorities. WHAT WAS SAID WHAT WAS SAID The full version of what former U.S. Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod said at a NAACP dinner in March was not originally posted online. Here are excerpts of what the edited version on biggovernment.com included and what it didn't. From the full video: "God is so good 'cause people like me don't get appointed to positions like state director of rural development. ... I've been out there at (every) grass-roots level and I've paid some dues. ...When I made that commitment, I wasn't making that commitment to black people and to black people only. But, you know God will show you things and He'll put things in your path so that that you realize that the struggle is really about poor people." From the video on biggovernment.com: "The first time I was faced with having to help a white farmer save his farm, he took a long time talking, but he was trying to show me he was superior to me. I know what he was doing. But he had come to me for help. ... "I was struggling with the fact that so many black people have 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, so that when he I assumed the Department of Agriculture had sent him to me. Either that or the Georgia Department of Agriculture. And he needed to go back and report that I did try to help him. "I took him to a white lawyer we had (who) had attended some of the training that we had provided. Because Chapter 12 bankruptcy had just been enacted for the family farmer. I figured if I take him to one of them, that his own kind would take care of him. ... From the full video: "Well, working with him made me see that it's really about those who have versus those who don't, you know. And they could be black; they could be white; they could be Hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people. ... "But where am I going with this? You know, I couldn't say 45 years ago I couldn't stand here and say what I'm saying what I will say to you tonight. Like I told you, God helped me to see that it's not just about black people it's about poor people. And I've come a long way. I knew that I couldn't live with hate. You know. As my mother has said to so many, 'If we had tried to live with hate in our hearts, we'd probably be dead now.' "But I've come to realize that we have to work together, and you know, it's sad that we don't have a room full of white and blacks here tonight, because we have to overcome the divisions that we have. We have to get to the point where, as Toni Morrison said, 'Race exists but it doesn't matter.' We have to work just as hard." JOIN THE CONVERSATION JOIN THE CONVERSATION Track the latest news about President Obama's administration with The Oval



READ THE LATEST POSTS READ THE LATEST POSTS Read all posts Calling Shirley Sherrod a "good woman put through hell" by his mistaken conclusion that she'd made a racist remark, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack apologized Wednesday for ousting Sherrod and offered her a new job. "There was no pressure from the White House" to remove Sherrod from her Agriculture Department job, Vilsack said. "It was my decision, and I regret having made it in haste. … I did not think before I acted." The affair illustrated how quickly politics can change in the age of the Internet and cable television. In less than 24 hours, a low-level bureaucrat in Georgia went from being the villain in a firestorm over race to the recipient of a Cabinet secretary's pleas from Washington. "I asked for her forgiveness, and she was gracious enough to extend it to me," Vilsack said of Sherrod, 62, who said she agreed to consider his job offer. THE OVAL:Sherrod wants to speak with Obama TRANSCRIPT EXCERPTS: What Shirley Sherrod said EARLIER: Fired employee says Obama White House wanted her out Sherrod, who is black, was forced to resign from her rural development job in Georgia after a conservative blogger posted a portion of a speech she gave in March at a local NAACP event. In the clip, she admitted that she failed to help a white farmer as much as she might have 24 years ago, when she was working for a farmers' aid group. In the context of the speech, however, the anecdote was told to illustrate Sherrod's change of heart and how she realized that people of all races need help. The farmer said this week that he was grateful to Sherrod for helping him keep his farm. After viewing the clip, not the entire 45-minute speech, the NAACP also had called for her removal — a position the group quickly abandoned after the context of Sherrod's remarks became clear. The Sherrod conflagration had two familiar accelerants: a media culture in which half-truths can spread like a virus online, to be instantly and endlessly chewed over on cable TV; and a continued preoccupation with race that has smashed hopes that President Obama's election portended a post-racial society. But the Internet is not new, cable is older, and race always has been a sensitive topic. What was remarkable this week was how they combined to create a climate in which two venerable institutions — the USDA and the NAACP — could rush so disastrously to judgment. Robert Thompson, a Syracuse University expert on television, compared the officials who turned against Sherrod with "the kind of people who believe everything they see on the Internet. The story here is the utter lack of due diligence by these officials. They really walked right into it." Donna Brazile, a Democratic strategist and an African-American, blamed "this rapid news cycle, the White House, the administration, the NAACP, the conservative noise machine, the liberal noise machine. We've got to learn to calm the waters." While Vilsack was apologizing, NAACP President Benjamin Jealous was said to be traveling and unavailable for comment. Leila McDowell, a spokeswoman for the civil-rights organization, referred to a statement posted earlier online that read, "we were snookered by Fox News and Tea Party activist Andrew Breitbart," the owner of the website that first carried the edited video of Sherrod. CNN, Fox's rival, claimed to have acted responsibly. CNN held off on airing the clip. "We did what the others didn't seem to do," said Sam Feist political director of CNN. "We actually worked the story." He said CNN didn't air a story about the episode until after Sherrod was fired late Monday, showing some of the clip. At 6:50 a.m. Tuesday, CNN aired a telephone interview with Sherrod, giving her side of the story. CNN also interviewed the farmer she had helped 24 years ago, Roger Spooner. Spokeswomen for Fox did not return calls Wednesday, as support for Sherrod swelled. Steve Hollis, a vice president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 3354 and an Agriculture Department IT specialist, knew Sherrod when she visited Missouri to train farmers how to market their products. "If Glenn Beck and those people are concerned about the color of the people she's helping," he said, referring to the Fox News Channel conservative commentator, "I know a lot of white farmers she's helped." Hollis said he believed the USDA shouldn't have sought Sherrod's resignation until it had her side of the story: "It was a crying shame that the secretary of Agriculture and the Obama White House apparently did no investigation." Earlier Wednesday, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs seemed to agree, saying, "A lot of people involved in this situation" were "acting without all the facts. "We live in a culture (in which) things whip around, people want fast responses, we want to give fast responses," Gibbs said. "One of the great lessons you take away from this is to ask all of the questions first." Later, Vilsack said his haste reflected a desire to improve the civil rights record of a department facing thousands of bias claims by minorities. CNN broadcast Gibbs' briefing live on a split screen, with the other half devoted to Sherrod, who was sitting in one of the network's studios and reacting to his remarks as he made them. When he apologized, Sherrod smiled broadly, seeming to enjoy her moment on a medium that had been the venue for her vilification earlier in the week. When reporters asked Gibbs whether he would like to say something directly to her, he declined. "I accept the apology," Sherrod said afterward. But she said the apology was too long in coming. The incident followed a dispute between the NAACP and the conservative Tea Party movement in which the former passed a resolution this month accusing the latter of having "racist elements." The two-minute, 38-second clip of Sherrod posted Monday by biggovernment.com was presented as evidence that the NAACP was hypocritical. The website's owner, Breitbart, said it showed the civil rights group itself condoning racism. "To divert this into a Shirley vs. Andrew show diverts from the concerted effort that the NAACP is going through to try to malign the Tea Party movement," Breitbart said in an interview Wednesday. (Biggovernment.com is the same site that last year aired video of workers for the community group ACORN counseling actors who were posing as a prostitute and her boyfriend.) Race-based distractions Obama's election in 2008 raised hope in some quarters that the United States might begin to move beyond race. Retired Memphis sanitation worker Taylor Rogers, who heard Martin Luther King Jr. speak the night before King was killed in Memphis in 1968, said part of King's dream had been realized: a president who would "bring the races together." But Sherrod's fall and rise was the latest in a series of racial incidents during Obama's presidency that have captured national attention and sometimes distracted the public from the administration's political agenda. • A year ago, Obama convened a "beer summit" at the White House between black Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates and a white police sergeant who arrested him after a confrontation in Cambridge, Mass. • The administration faced criticism over then-Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor's comments about the virtues of having a "wise Latina" on the bench. • The Justice Department has attracted criticism for dropping an investigation into complaints that members of the radical New Black Panther Party threatened white voters at a Philadelphia polling place on Election Day 2008. The Justice Department attorney who brought the complaint, J. Christian Adams, resigned June 4. In testimony before the Commission on Civil Rights, he said the civil rights division is hostile to race-neutral enforcement and reluctant to bring cases against African-Americans on behalf of whites. The Justice Department "makes enforcement decisions based on the merits, not the race, gender or ethnicity of any party involved," replied department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler. The blame game Even as the Sherrod affair played out Wednesday, the battle continued over what it meant and who was responsible. Bob Parks, a conservative black political analyst, blamed Obama, whom he accused of sitting by while Democrats called members of the Tea Party racists. "This is supposed to be the same president who gave us a lecture on racism" during the presidential campaign, he said. Eric Boehlert, a liberal media analyst, blamed the right: "The right wing media under Obama has just sort of turned itself into this never-ending, churning, attack machine. And nine times out of 10 (the attacks are) just bogus. And nine times out of 10, the press doesn't give them any attention." In the clip originally posted on biggovernment.com, Sherrod described the first time a white farmer came to her for help. This was Roger Spooner and it was 1986, when she was working for a nonprofit rural farm aid group, not the government. She said the farmer came in acting "superior" to her and she debated how much help to give him. Sherrod continued: "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." At first, she said, "I didn't give him the full force of what I could do," only enough help keep his case moving through the aid system. Eventually, she said, his situation "opened my eyes" to the idea that whites were struggling just as blacks were, and that helping farmers wasn't so much about race but was "about the poor versus those who have." Sherrod said in interviews this week that she tried to explain that to Agriculture Department officials, to no avail. She said she was traveling Monday when USDA Deputy Undersecretary of rural development Cheryl Cook called her and told her to pull over and submit her resignation on her BlackBerry because the White House wanted her out — an apparent contradiction of Vilsack's version. "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." The Georgia farmer, Spooner, is now 87. He told USA TODAY on Wednesday that Sherrod did everything she could to help him when he was weeks away from losing his farm at a government auction. He said Sherrod first took him to a black lawyer, who didn't help. And so, Spooner said, Sherrod drove him and his wife 40 miles north, to see a white lawyer who did. En route, he said, "we went by the place where (Sherrod) was raised, between Albany and Americus. She told us how her daddy had gotten killed by a white farmer in 1965. She had a right to be mad at every white farmer after her daddy got killed." Spooner said Wednesday he still wasn't sure how he ended up in the middle of a national brouhaha over race, politics and media: "I don't know where this got all blown out of proportion. It's like — you ever seen where two or three people say something, and before long you don't even recognize it?" Contributors: Susan Page, Gregory Korte, Donna Leinwand, Peter Eisler, Marisol Bello, Mimi Hall, Chuck Raasch of Gannett, The Associated Press. TRANSCRIPT EXCERPTS: The full version of what former U.S. Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod said at an NAACP dinner in March was not originally posted online. Here are excerpts of what the edited version on biggovernment.com included — and what it didn't. From the full video: "God is so good 'cause people like me don't get appointed to positions like state director of rural development. ... I've been out there at (every) grass-roots level and I've paid some dues. ...When I made that commitment, I wasn't making that commitment to black people — and to black people only. But, you know God will show you things and He'll put things in your path so that — that you realize that the struggle is really about poor people." From the video on biggovernment.com: "The first time I was faced with having to help a white farmer save his farm, he took a long time talking, but he was trying to show me he was superior to me. I know what he was doing. But he had come to me for help. ... "I was struggling with the fact that so many black people have 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, so that when he — I assumed the Department of Agriculture had sent him to me. Either that or the Georgia Department of Agriculture. And he needed to go back and report that I did try to help him. "I took him to a white lawyer we had — (who) had attended some of the training that we had provided. Because Chapter 12 bankruptcy had just been enacted for the family farmer. I figured if I take him to one of them, that his own kind would take care of him. ... From the full video: "Well, working with him made me see that it's really about those who have vs. those who don't, you know. And they could be black; they could be white; they could be Hispanic. And it made me realize then that I needed to work to help poor people. ... "But where am I going with this? You know, I couldn't say 45 years ago — I couldn't stand here and say what I'm saying — what I will say to you tonight. Like I told you, God helped me to see that it's not just about black people — it's about poor people. And I've come a long way. I knew that I couldn't live with hate. You know. As my mother has said to so many, 'If we had tried to live with hate in our hearts, we'd probably be dead now.' "But I've come to realize that we have to work together, and you know, it's sad that we don't have a room full of white and blacks here tonight, because we have to overcome the divisions that we have. We have to get to the point where, as Toni Morrison said, 'Race exists but it doesn't matter.' We have to work just as hard." We've updated the Conversation Guidelines. Changes include a brief review of the moderation process and an explanation on how to use the "Report Abuse" button. Read more