In July 2010, Breitbart produced a video purporting to show Sherrod admitting to an NAACP audience that she had discriminated against a white farmer because of his race. Sherrod felt pressured to resign her position, which she did. After it was revealed that the video was heavily edited, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack offered Sherrod a job but she declined to return to the department. Later in July, Sherrod told the National Association of Black Journalists that she was going to sue Breitbart. "He had to know that he was targeting me," Sherrod said in a discussion with three NABJ members. "I will definitely sue."
Breitbart responded to the lawsuit on his website that he "categorically rejects the transparent effort to chill his constitutionally protected free speech and, to reiterate, looks forward to exercising his full and broad discovery rights." (Read more)
"Coincidentally, Shirley Sherrod and four other cooperative leaders will be inducted into the Cooperative Hall of Fame here May 4," Washington newsletter Agri-Pulse reports. "Sherrod will be honored for her civil rights leadership. She participated in successful legal action against USDA for discriminatory lending practices after a 6,000-acre cooperative and land trust she co-founded was forced into foreclosure. She is also being cited for her field staff work at the Federation of Southern Cooperatives.
"Others to be honored are Noel Estenson, who was CEO of the old Cenex co-op and of its successor CHS until his retirement in 2000; former Rep. Daniel A. Mica, D-Fla., who was CEO of the Credit Union National Association after leaving Congress, and Gloria and Stanley Kuehn, agricultural development pioneers in Salvador and Nicaragua. He was country director for the National Cooperative Business Association."
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