Shirley Sherrod, Ousted USDA Official: Where Is She Now?

Shirley Sherrod was just one of a host of people who momentarily grabbed the spotlight in 2010 and dominated a news cycle or two while getting their 15 minutes of fame. In this series, AOL News is checking in on these newsmakers and giving them a 16th minute.

Shirley Sherrod Made News in 2010 When She: Was forced to resign by the U.S. Department of Agriculture after a video clip showed her making what some considered to be racist comments about a white farmer. She later received an apology when the full video showed that she was actually advocating racial tolerance and understanding.

Shirley Sherrod, the black Agriculture Department employee, who was vindicated after being fired when a blogger posted a doctored video to make her appear racist, recounts her ordeal to the congregation of the Metropolitan A.M.E. Church in Washington, Sunday, Sept. 19, 2010. Sherrod said she was sustained by her Christian faith during her ouster as Georgia's director of rural development last July.

J. Scott Applewhite, AP

Shirley Sherrod, the ousted USDA employee who was later vindicated, has been giving talks across the country about the importance of fighting racism.

The Full Story: In July, as black farmers awaited a settlement from a yearslong class-action discrimination lawsuit against the USDA, a clip of Sherrod was posted on the conservative website BigGovernment.com. The video at first glance suggested that Sherrod, a black woman and the agency's Georgia director of rural development, had acted with bigotry toward a white farmer.

In the highly edited video, Sherrod seemed to say that she didn't help a white farmer save his farm because of his race. "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," she said.

Sherrod was condemned by everyone from Bill O'Reilly to the NAACP, and she was forced to resign. "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 July 20.

But white farmers began to come forward speaking out on her behalf, and within days, it became clear that the rest of the video told a different story. In the same speech, Sherrod explained that she later befriended the white farmer and his wife and helped save their farm. Then, she went on to speak about the importance of getting beyond race.

President Barack Obama personally called Sherrod to apologize and offer her another job at the USDA, but she declined the offer.

If the Sherrod affair was embarrassing for the White House, it was especially mortifying for the NAACP, which said it had been "snookered" into calling for Sherrod's head. The civil rights group had described her speech as "appalling" before the full video was shown.

What's Happened Since? Since turning down an offer to return to the USDA, Sherrod has been working the speaking circuit, giving talks to students and foundations across the country about the history of black farmers and the USDA and about the importance of fighting racism.

She told graduates at Albany State University in Georgia last week that racism is "alive and well" but can be fought. "We can make a difference," she told the students, according to the Albany Herald. "We, and I'm talking to the older people in the audience, we need to work on this issue so that we don't pass that on to our children."

In Her Own Words: "Well, I'm not employed anymore," Sherrod said in an interview with Newsweek. A request for comment, sent through her publicist, was not immediately returned today.
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