Shirley Sherrod, Whose Father Was Murdered by a Racist, Overcomes and Succeeds

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             Former USDA official Shirley Sherrod, center

Ousted U.S. Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod has every reason to be a wild-eyed, poison-tongued racist. But she is not.

When she was 17 years old, her father, a farmer named Hosie Miller, was murdered in cold blood when a white farmer shot him in the back over a dispute about a few cows. Because this was the Deep South during the pre-civil rights era, the all-white grand jury in rural southwest Georgia refused to bring murder charges and let that white killer walk away a free man.


That same year her inalienable right to vote was denied by whites and, worse, her husband-to-be was thrown down the stairs by the county sheriff.

Twenty years later, Sherrod and her husband, Charles, could only stand back and watch as the 6,000-acre cooperative they founded in Lee County, Ga., languished and died from systematic racism by the federal government.


And this past week, Sherrod was told to pull her car over to the side of the road in order to text in her resignation after an irresponsibly edited video of an old speech she gave falsely painted her as a racist.

Worse, Fox News, with fiendish and ghoulish savagery, tried to make Sherrod out to be some kind of rabid animal. Yet, her soul remains free of venom and acrimony at those who did their best to destroy her.

Shirley Sherrod is a remarkable woman who has continued to support a corroded and putrid system that failed her horribly time and time again. Most people may not have been able to overcome the intense bitterness that would have built up within them like a volcano. But Sherrod has.

“I can’t hold a grudge. I can’t even stay mad for long,” she told CNN in the first of dozens of interviews she‘s conducting in Atlanta and New York. “I just try to work to make things different.”

That she did. Sherrod joined her mother in the civil rights movement and joined SNCC to fight for integration and voting rights for blacks in the South. As a USDA official, Sherrod secured the largest settlement for black farmers ever — over $1 billion — recently.

Finally, at 62 years of age, the low-level employee of the Department of Agriculture is finally the star that her character, her work ethic, her skills and her almost supernatural ability to forgive have rightfully earned her. –terry shropshire

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