Former USDA official Sherrod says NAACP important for rural African Americans

UPDATE, Aug. 21: Sherrod will meet with Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack Tuesday to discuss a job offer, CNN reports.

Shirley Sherrod, the former Department of Agriculture Rural Development director in Georgia who delivered a message to an NAACP banquet and ended up the subject of a heavily edited video by blogger Andrew Breitbart, writes for the NAACP blog about her experience and her conversation with NAACP President Benjamin Jealous: "As he has done in public, Ben movingly apologized for the fact that the NAACP was initially hoodwinked by Breitbart and Fox into supporting my removal. I told him what I want to tell you. That's behind us, and the last thing I want to see happen is for my situation to weaken support for the NAACP. Too many people confronted by racism and poverty count on the NAACP to be there for them, especially those in rural areas who often have nowhere else to turn."

While a teenager, Sherrod's father was murdered in Baker County, Georgia (pop. 3,637). The crime was witnessed by three people, but a grand jury did not indict the white suspect. Sherrod vowed to stay in Georgia and fight racism. Said Sherrod: "I didn't yield when, just months after my father was killed, they came in the middle of the night to burn a cross in front of our house with my mother, four sisters, and the baby brother my father never got to see still inside. And I'm surely not going to yield because some Tea Party agitator sat at his computer and turned everything I said upside down and inside out. "

Sherrod said she learned much from her parents. Among the most important lessons she learned from her mother: "We mustn't try to live with hate in our hearts." (Read more)