The president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People apologized Tuesday to a black civil servant whose ouster the civil rights organization had originally cheered. Last week, the N.A.A.C.P. garnered headlines when it accused parts of the Tea Party movement of being racist. Then, over the weekend, a video emerged of Shirley Sherrod, the head of the Department of Agriculture’s rural development office in Georgia, speaking at an N.A.A.C.P. event in Douglas, Ga., in March. In a two-and-a-half-minute clip, Ms. Sherrod seemed to explain that she discriminated against a white farmer 24 years ago.
Ms. Sherrod said she was pressed to resign after the video whipped around the Web. But she said the clip was misleading. According to Ms. Sherrod and people who have seen the full video, she went on to say in her speech that she had learned from working with the farmer that all people must overcome their prejudices.
After seeing the full video, the N.A.A.C.P. said Tuesday that it had been “snookered” into believing Ms. Sherrod had acted with bias.
“We are in a moment where there is heightened sensitivity and concern, including within the N.A.A.C.P., about discrimination against white people,” said Benjamin T. Jealous, the group’s president. He said the N.A.A.C.P. wanted “to be clear that there’s a single yardstick by which civil rights are judged.”
In the video, which received much airtime on the Fox News Channel on Monday, Ms. Sherrod recalled working for a nonprofit organization in Georgia.
“I was struggling with the fact that so many black people had lost their farmland, and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land,” Ms. Sherrod said in the video. “So I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough.”
The video was spotlighted by Andrew Breitbart, a conservative blogger known for promoting videos that emerged last year and ultimately brought down Acorn, the community organizing group. By Monday evening, Ms. Sherrod was out of her job. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack cited the agency’s “zero-tolerance” policy on discrimination in explaining her ouster.
Ms. Sherrod took to the airwaves, especially those of CNN, on Tuesday. She told the network that the N.A.A.C.P. was “the reason why this happened.”
“They got into a fight with the Tea Party, and all of this came out as a result of that,” she said.
Mr. Breitbart reached a similar conclusion, though from a different perspective. “They’re trying to make this about me and Shirley Sherrod. This is about the N.A.A.C.P.,” he said by phone. He said that the civil rights group had “spent an inordinate amount of airtime trying to brand the Tea Party as racist” while tolerating racism itself.
