The Black History of the White House

by Clarence Lusane

  The Gates controversy revolved around Obama’s use of a loaded word whose racial dimensions were seized upon by the conservative press and opportunistic politicians. The situation’s ultimate resolution by the “beer summit” evaded the larger issue of racism in the criminal justice system. However, it would be the actions of his administration in another incident that revealed the power of the right-wing media to strike fear throughout his government when it comes to racial matters. On July 19, 2010, conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart, who has a long history of producing carefully doctored videos, posted a video clip on his website, Biggovernment.org, a clip that had already been circulating on two other right-wing websites, Hotair.com and USActionNews.com. It reportedly showed a black U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) employee stating that she had discriminated against a white farmer because he was white and arrogant. The employee, Shirley Sherrod, says in the two-and-a-half-minute clip that she did not give “the full force of what [she] could do” to help a white farmer who came to her for assistance.73 Her remarks were given at an event held by the NAACP in Douglas, Georgia. On Monday morning, July 19, the story was picked up by Fox News and began to rapidly spread to other news organizations and throughout the Internet.

  Racial tensions were in the air, because the previous week had witnessed a public scuffle between the NAACP and the tea party movement. On July 14, 2010, the NAACP passed a resolution at its annual convention that called for tea party leaders to denounce the racist behavior that had been manifest at some of its events.74 The response of some tea party leaders and activists was to incorrectly accuse the NAACP of calling the entire tea party movement racist. The controversy was furthered intensified when one tea party leader, Mark Williams of the Tea Party Express, wrote a supposedly satirical letter from an enslaved black individual to President Lincoln using racist imagery and language. He wrote, “We Coloreds have taken a vote and decided that we don’t cotton to that whole emancipation thing. Freedom means having to work for real, think for ourselves, and take consequences along with the rewards. That is just far too much to ask of us Colored People and we demand that it stop.”75 He and the Tea Party Express were subsequently booted out of the National Tea Party Federation, an organization with dozens of member organizations and affiliates. Tea party leaders from Sarah Palin to Michelle Bachman defended the virtually all-white movement against the NAACP, mostly by not addressing the issue that had been raised but simply accusing the NAACP of being racial hustlers or worse.

  When the Sherrod story first broke, officials at the USDA panicked, believing that the administration was about to be attacked for sanctioning “reverse racism.” Reportedly, some unnamed sources within the White House raised concerns that all the facts were not known, but no one there intervened to prevent what occurred next.76 Within hours, Sherrod came under intense pressure from high officials in the department, including Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, who, solely based on news reports, wanted to put her on immediate suspension. Sherrod had been appointed in August 2009 as the first black director of the USDA’s Rural Development in Georgia. At one point, on Monday evening, Undersecretary Cheryl Cook caught up with Sherrod as she was driving. Sherrod stated that while she was attempting to explain her side of the story, she was asked to pull over to the side of the road and immediately submit her resignation via text message, because the issue was “going to be on Glenn Beck” that evening.77 In fact, she had tried days earlier to warn Vilsack and other USDA officials that a bogus clip was circulating, but information she sent via email either went to addresses that were no longer in use, rarely checked, or were sat on by a mid-level official.78 Sherrod was pressured to resign, but she did not go down passively. Meanwhile, the NAACP issued a statement denouncing Sherrod and applauding her resignation. Officials with the organization had addressed the issue earlier with the White House Office of Public Engagement, an office run by Obama’s highest ranking black staffer, Valarie Jarrett.79 The NAACP wrote in its condemnation, “We concur with U.S. Agriculture Secretary Vilsack in accepting the resignation of Shirley Sherrod for her remarks at a local NAACP Freedom Fund banquet. Racism is about the abuse of power. Sherrod had it in her position at USDA. According to her remarks, she mistreated a white farmer in need of assistance because of his race. We are appalled by her actions, just as we are with abuses of power against farmers of color and female farmers.”80

  Suspicious of the source, some news organizations, in particular MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and CNN, raised questions about the legitimacy of the tape and tried to locate Sherrod to interview her. As it turned out, by Tuesday morning the clip was exposed to be entirely misleading—in fact, Sherrod had been using the story to tell how she overcame whatever prejudicial feelings she had had, realizing that people of all races needed help. The incident had occurred twenty-four years earlier in 1985 when she worked for a local nonprofit, the Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Black Land Fund (FSC), not while she was an employee of the U.S. government. In the full version of the speech, she states, “God helped me to see that it’s not just about black people—it’s about poor people.”81 In speaking about her work helping the farmer in question, she stated, “Well, working with him made me see that it’s really about those who have versus those who don’t, you know. And they could be black; they could be white; they could be Hispanic.”82 She ended up playing a decisive role in helping the farmer, Roger Spooner, save his farm, a fact that he and his wife, Eloise, testified to in subsequent media interviews.83 Calls and emails began to flood into the White House and Agriculture Department demanding Sherrod’s reinstatement.

  The cruel irony of the situation, in which a black USDA employee is accused of racism against a white farmer and is forced to resign, was that in the long history of struggle around black land ownership and fairness for black farmers, the USDA had never fired a single white employee for the virulent, overt, and persistent racism in its ranks against blacks and other people of color. That the USDA has a dishonorable record of racial discrimination is indisputable. In its history of documented racism the USDA has denied loans to black and minority farmers, given loans that were too late in the farming cycle, conducted excessive supervisions of loans that white farmers did not have to endure, ignored black famers’ claims of discrimination, disrespected individuals, and had a mostly whites-only hiring policy.84 In 1983, President Reagan eliminated the USDA Office of Civil Rights, which would not be reopened until 1996, but even then did little to address the concerns of farmers of color.85 Indeed, the USDA’s own National Commission on Small Farmers—which itself was created as a result of black farmer’s complaints about discrimination—declared in 1998 it was disturbed by “the indifference and blatant discrimination experienced by minority farmers in their interactions with USDA programs and staff. . . . Discrimination has been a contributing factor in the dramatic decline of Black farmers over the last several decades.”86

  Sherrod herself had been a victim of USDA discrimination. In 1969, the Sherrods founded the New Communities Land Trust, a black farm cooperative in Lee County, Georgia. Suffering from the same drought that struck much of the South in the mid-to-late 1970s, New Communities applied for and was promised an emergency loan by federal authorities in1982. However, the distribution of the money was controlled by state officials then under the governorship of stern segregationist Lester Maddox of pickaxe fame. The “emergency loan” came three years too late and the farm was forced to close in 1985. A Sherrod family farm faced a similar fate, which is why she was included in the subsequent lawsuit filed by black farmers against the USDA.87

  More generally, the racism that denied assistance to black farmers continually for more than 100 years has been a central factor in shaping the economic fortune of millions of African Americans, resonating in the disproportionate levels of poverty that exist in the black community today. On January 16, 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman issued Field Order 15, which promised forty acres of th
e South Carolina Sea Islands and plantations from Charleston to Jacksonville, South Carolina, and a mule to those who had left slavery and were working with the Union army.88 This pledge was given further legal support on March 3, 1865, when Lincoln signed the Freedmen’s Bureau Act, which assigned “not more than 40 acres” to the freed to rent with an option to purchase after three years.89 Lincoln also had created the USDA in 1862 referring to it as the “people’s department.”90 Indeed, more than 40,000 African Americans had settled on confiscated land by June 1865.91 However, after Lincoln’s assassination April 14, President Andrew Johnson rescinded the order in his effort to reintegrate southern rebels into the nation. At the expense of African Americans, Johnson issued an amnesty order that included property restoration, and blacks were subsequently forced off these lands. Despite the broken promise of the U.S. government, by 1900, African Americans owned 15 million acres of land mostly in the South. By 1910 this would grow to 16 million, with a peak of 925,000 black farmers in 1920. This would represent a high point, as discrimination and racism, including by the USDA, would significantly reduce this ownership over the next 100 years. By 2000, according to a statement made by Judge Paul Freidman in the successful lawsuit against the USDA by black farmers, there were only about 18,000 black farmers left on less than three million acres.92

  A number of black farm organizations would rise over the years to fight back against the unjust and racist policies of local, state, and federal officials. This would include the Colored Farmers National Alliance and Cooperative Union, National Black Farmer’s Association, Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association (BFAA), and Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Black Land Fund (FSC), with whom Sherrod had once worked as a staff member. In 1997, black farmers filed a lawsuit, Pigford v. Glickman, against the USDA for discrimination. In 1999, the black farmers won over $2.3 billion in what has been called “the largest civil rights settlement in history.”93 However, many black farmers were left out of the suit, because it only covered those who had been discriminated against between 1981 and 1996. And some estimate that even among this restricted group, close to 90 percent of farmers were denied when they applied for restitution.94 That figure is probably accurate given that the Bush administration spent more than 56,000 office hours and $12 million fighting the claims made by black farmers.95 A suit dubbed Pigford II, initiated by members of Congress and carried through by the Obama administration, won an agreement that included an additional payout to more than 65,000 black farmers who were excluded from the original suit.

  Indeed, Vilsack himself stated soon after coming to office, “Civil rights is one of my top priorities,” and “I intend to take definitive action to improve USDA’s record on civil rights.”96 Obama proposed $1.25 billion in his 2010 budget to pay what is owed to the black farmers, a proposal that Republicans in Congress have repeatedly blocked as of August 2010.97

  It is also notable that Sherrod herself has been a critical actor in this history. When she was seventeen years old, her father was murdered by a white man in Baker County, Georgia. There were three witnesses, but the grand jury refused to indict the person responsible. 98 Months later, a cross was burned in front of their home in an effort to intimidate the family. Outraged by the injustice, Shirley’s mother became a local civil rights leader in Baker County, Georgia where they lived, and later became the county’s first black elected official, a position she still holds.99 As noted by researcher and former Boston judge Margaret Burnham, Baker County had a long and notorious record of lynching blacks, often with the complicity and leadership of the local law enforcement.100 Rather than leave the South, Shirley Sherrod decided to stay and try to bring about much needed social and racial justice. Her activism was enhanced when she married Charles Sherrod, a founder and leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Albany, Georgia. They both remained activists on issues of fairness and antipoverty. She worked for a number of organizations and movements, earning a stellar reputation as a strong, reliable, articulate, and committed leader to the region’s poor, traits that were revealed in her media interviews as the controversy unfolded.

  Given this history and Breitbart’s discredited record, both the administration and the NAACP should have acted more cautiously before going after Sherrod. Vilsack and USDA officials clearly violated her right to due process, not to mention the simple protocol of giving her the benefit of the doubt until she could reply to her accusers. At a minimum, they had the responsibility to perform an investigation prior to initiating such strong action against her. So did the NAACP. The incident in question took place at a meeting of one of their chapters, allowing the organization immediate access to witnesses of the speech as well as videos of the event. In fact, once the leadership did look at the entire speech, the NAACP immediately issued an apology, stating that it had been “snookered” by Breitbart and calling for her reinstatement.101

  Strong letters of support were sent from the FSC and BFAA. In a blistering letter, FSC Executive Director Ralph Paige charged the USDA with failing to review the facts before it acted and, noting Sherrod’s “remarkable career,” argued that she deserved “to be honored” rather than persecuted.102 BFAA President Gary Grant also called Sherrod “honorable and hard working” and Vilsack’s statement that the USDA does not tolerate racism “a complete lie.”103 Singer Willie Nelson, who is president of Farm Aid, called her “a great friend” to himself and the Farm Aid, and noted that “advocates like Ms. Sherrod have moved mountains to ensure that families can remain in their homes and on their farms.”104 Sherrod would later state, “It hurts me that they didn’t even try to attempt to see what is happening here, they didn’t care.”105

  Meanwhile, on Tuesday July 20, 2010, USDA officials vacillated even as the evidence mounted that Sherrod had been framed. Vilsack stated that regardless of the context, her comments—or, more honestly, the right-wing hysteria about them—“compromise the director’s ability to do her job.”106 In other words, conservative accusations of “reverse racism,” whether true or not, were enough to have someone dismissed from the employ of the Obama administration. However, Sherrod’s powerful interviews in the media, letters and emails from around the nation, and even a retreat by Breitbart himself, disingenuously claiming that he did not know the clip was incomplete, forced the administration to change its position. On Wednesday, July 21, apologies were issued by both White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs and Vilsack. Gibbs stated, “On behalf of our administration, I offer an apology.”107 Vilsack remarked, “This is a good woman. She’s been put through hell. She was put through hell, and I could have done and should have done a better job,” and even offered Sherrod a new position at USDA focused on civil rights.108 On July 22, 2010 President Obama called Sherrod to apologize as well. According to the Washington Times, he expressed his regrets about the whole situation and told her that “this misfortune can present an opportunity for her to continue her hard work on behalf of those in need, and he hopes that she will do so.”109 Sherrod accepted Obama’s apology, but also invited him to come to the South to witness the ongoing struggles of black farmers and other poor working people in the region. She volunteered to guide him on the tour. There was also a reconciliation between her and the NAACP. In an open letter she wrote to the NAACP “You and I Can’t Yield—Not Now, Not Ever,” she stated that she did not want the incident to be used against the organization and she supported their work.110 Above all, Sherrod demonstrates the type of powerful leadership that is needed to overcome current efforts by conservatives to roll back the gains of people of color, working people, and others who must continue to fight for inclusion and equality.

  While Vilsack took personal responsibility for what occurred, Obama and the White House blamed the media environment for the rapid spread of the story and the reactions of his administration. There is no argument that some in the media played a harmful role in the controversy, Fox News and other conservative media outlets in particular. But many believe that t
he fear of right-wing media has created a milieu encouraging knee-jerk reactions to even the slightest threat of bad news, particularly on the issue of race, and that it is this fear that drives the administration’s actions. As some noted, it is hard to imagine that the Bush administration would have fired a staffer because an unsubstantiated (or even substantiated) report was going to be discussed on the left-leaning The Keith Olberman Show or Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now! The incident revealed that the Obama administration gave undue power and influence to the likes of Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh to shape its agenda. The embarrassing fact that the president himself had to express his regrets to Sherrod made it more likely that those in his administration who believe any discussion about race should be taboo will continue to hold sway against those who argue that proactive words and deeds are needed more than ever. It is possible, however, that the Sherrod incident represents a turning point, making it clear to the Obama White House that it must stand on principle and fight for racial justice and fairness regardless of the rantings of its opponents or even the political costs at stake.

  As president of the United States, Obama confronts a confluence of unique challenges unlike any his predecessors ever faced. He won the White House in a period of transition, when U.S. political, economic, military, and cultural power was being resisted on numerous fronts. The effective dissolution of the G-7, the outdated coalition of finance ministers of dominant Western nations—Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, and United States—who set much of the world’s economic and political agenda, represents the collapse of one model of hegemonic global governance that has been replaced by the G-20.111 The rise of the G-20, incorporating states from the global North and global South, reflects the early twenty-first-century change in the balance of power worldwide, with the United States (and other Western powers) holding diminished authority and no longer able to dictate the world’s agenda.112 Although in most ways, the formation of the G-20 represents a change in form more than a true seizure of power, it foreshadows a trend with the potential to bring about such a transformation. In the immediate, the so-called BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, and China) and the European Union provide substantive oppositional politics and a growing economic threat to U.S. hegemony.