Administration Apologizes, Offers to Rehire Sherrod

(July 21) -- An embarrassed Obama administration apologized to a black official who was ousted from the U.S. Department of Agriculture in a racial flap, and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said he had offered Shirley Sherrod a new job at the agency.

Vilsack told reporters in Washington that he had apologized to Sherrod and that she accepted.

"I started off by extending to her my personal and profound apologies for pain and discomfort that has been caused to her and her family over the course of the last several days," Vilsack said. "She was extraordinarily gracious."

He said he had asked her to come back to work at a different position at the USDA. Sherrod told The Associated Press she was considering it.

"They did make an offer," she said. "I just told him I need to think about it."

The offer came after the White House apologized and said Sherrod had been the victim of a rush to judgment.

"Decisions were made based on an incomplete set of facts," press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters at the daily briefing.

While watching the news conference -- on camera from CNN's studio -- Sherrod smiled and nodded her head.

"It makes me feel better," she told CNN later. "This shouldn't have happened. It took too long, but it makes me feel better that the apology has finally come."

Sherrod, 62, resigned Monday as the USDA's director of rural development in Georgia after a conservative website posted a clip of a speech that included her saying that she didn't help a white farmer as much as she could have because of his race. She said the clip excluded her comments saying she did help the farmer keep his farm. The farmer and his wife came to her defense Tuesday and said she should have kept her job.

Gibbs said the Obama administration made decisions based on incomplete information. "A disservice was done for which we apologize," he said.

Gibbs blamed the media for rushing to judgment about Sherrod and fanning the flames of the scandal as well. "I think everybody has to go back ... and ask themselves, how did we get into this?" he said. "How did we not ask the right questions? How did you all not ask the right questions?"

Sherrod has also been very critical of her treatment in the media, particularly by conservative media outlets Fox News and Breitbart.com. In an interview with Media Matters late Tuesday, Sherrod had strong words for those outlets.

"When you look at their reporting, this is just another way of seeing that they are [racist]," Sherrod told Media Matters late Tuesday.

She explained why she rejected requests from Fox News for an interview. "I am just a pawn," Sherrod said. "They are after a bigger thing. They would love to take us back to where we were many years ago -- back to where black people were looking down, not looking white folks in the face, not being able to compete for a job out there and not be a whole person."

Unsurprisingly, Gibbs spoke far less candidly about race, but called the ordeal a "teachable moment," a reference to the 2009 "beer summit" among President Barack Obama, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley.

Vilsack's statement came after the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which at first condemned Sherrod but then said it had been "snookered" by activists, put the full video of Sherrod's speech on its site Tuesday night.

Sherrod said the USDA's turnaround has been difficult for her.

"It's so hard," Sherrod said on NBC's "Today" show. "When this first came to light, I said to them, 'You need to look at the whole thing.' That's not the message I was putting out there."

"And for them, all day yesterday, to say they were standing by their decision, and now at this late hour to be saying they're now willing to look at the facts, it's hard to take at this point," she told NBC.

In the clip posted Monday, Sherrod talks about a white farmer who came to her for help 24 years ago when she was working not for the federal government but for the Georgia field office of the Federation of Southern Cooperative/Land Assistance Fund.

In her speech, given in March at an NAACP banquet, Sherrod says, "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.

"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," she says. "So I didn't give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough."

The clip left off the rest of the story in which she says she helped the farmer avoid foreclosure and became friendly with him and his wife. Sherrod said that she tells the story as an example of how she tried to get beyond race and that she went on to help other white farmers.

Before hearing the entire speech, the NAACP said it was "appalled by her actions," but changed its stance Tuesday and noted that the family credited her with saving its 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," NAACP President Benjamin Jealous said in a statement Tuesday.

Sherrod said today she was "particularly hurt" by the NAACP's initial comments but appreciated its later statement. She said nobody could think she was racist after viewing the entire speech.

"All of my life has been about civil rights work and fairness," she said on "Today."

The farming family, Roger and Eloise Spooner, of Iron City, Ga., is supporting Sherrod.

"We probably wouldn't have [our farm] today if it hadn't been for her leading us in the right direction," Eloise Spooner told The Associated Press. "I wish she could get her job back, because she was good to us, I tell you."