7797: NAACP “Snookered.”

From AOLNews…

Farmer, NAACP Back USDA Official Who Quit in Racial Flap

By Lisa Flam

The NAACP said today it was “snookered” into condemning former black USDA official Shirley Sherrod after seeing a partial video clip in which Sherrod made comments about not helping a white farmer as much as she should have.

The civil rights group’s reversal came after Sherrod said her comments had been taken out of context and the farmer’s wife came to her defense. Elouise Spooner said Sherrod had helped save her family farm and is “a friend for life.”

Spooner told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Sherrod was not being treated fairly. “I said, ‘That ain’t right. They have not treated her right,’ “she told the newspaper.

Sherrod said the U.S. Department of Agriculture didn’t know the whole story and succumbed to political pressure in forcing her to step down. She resigned Monday as the agency’s rural development director for Georgia after a clip of the speech was posted online by conservative outlets, biggovernment.com and later FoxNews.

In a poor-quality clip from a speech she reportedly gave on March 27 at an NAACP Freedom Fund banquet, she talks about working with a farmer, identified by CNN as Roger Spooner, who was condescending to her.

“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,” Sherrod says in the video, as the crowd laughs.

“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.”

But Elouise Spooner, 82, said Sherrod’s efforts were good enough for her. “She gave enough that it helped us save our farm,” she told CNN in an interview today.

Sherrod told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution early today that she was relating an event that happened 24 years ago, before she worked for the federal government. And she denied she is racist.

Sherrod, 62, told the paper the short clip left out the rest of the story, when she says she eventually worked with the farmer to help him avoid foreclosure, and became friendly with him and his wife. At the time, Sherrod worked with the Georgia field office for the Federation of Southern Cooperative/Land Assistance Fund.

“And I went on to work with many more white farmers,” she told the paper. “The story helped me realize that race is not the issue, it’s about the people who have and the people who don’t. When I speak to groups, I try to speak about getting beyond the issue of race.”

In an interview with the newspaper today, Elouise Spooner said she spoke to Sherrod on the phone today and will publicly support her. “She helped us and we’re going to help her,” she said. She later told CNN that the government “didn’t do the right thing” in forcing Sherrod out.

The USDA condemned her comments in the clip.

“There is zero tolerance for discrimination at USDA, and I strongly condemn any act of discrimination against any person,” Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said in a statement carried by several news outlets. “We have been working hard through the past 18 months to reverse the checkered civil rights history at the department and take the issue of fairness and equality very seriously.”

The NAACP initially supported Vilsack’s decision to accept Sherrod’s resignation.

“We are appalled by her actions, just as we are with abuses of power against farmers of color and female farmers,” NAACP President Benjamin Jealous said in a statement.

But the group retracted its criticism late this afternoon. It said in a statement that it was changing its stance on Sherrod after viewing the whole tape, talking to the former official, and listening to the farmers involved in the story, who “personally credit her with helping to save the family farm.”

“We have come to the conclusion we were snookered by Fox News and tea party activist Andrew Breitbart into believing she had harmed white farmers because of racial bias,” Jealous said in the statement.

Asked this morning on CNN why she didn’t tell the USDA the rest of the story, Sherrod said, “I did say that. But they, for some reason, the stuff that Fox and the tea party does is scaring the administration.

“I told them, ‘Get the whole tape’ … and look at how I tell people we have to get beyond race and start working together,” she said, adding later: “I tried to fight, but I didn’t have any support from the United States Department of Agriculture.”

Her resignation came after the NAACP passed a resolution condemning what it called racism within the tea party movement.