Sherrod Story False (claims relative was lynched)

The American Spectator ^ | July 26, 2010 | Jeffrey Lord

[This Just In]

Sherrod Story False

By Jeffrey Lord

It isn't true.

Shirley Sherrod's story in her now famous speech about the lynching of a relative is not true. The veracity and credibility of the onetime Agriculture Department bureaucrat at the center of the explosive controversy between the NAACP and conservative media activist Andrew Breitbart is now directly under challenge. By nine Justices of the United States Supreme Court. All of them dead.

But first, it's important to say this.

After Shirley Sherrod's firing I wrote a column congratulating Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack for removing her -- based on a viewing of the now infamous edited Breitbart clip. I was wrong. I should have waited to see the entire video or read the transcript before writing a word. So my apologies to Ms. Sherrod.

The problem?

I have now done exactly what I should have done originally. So there's no mistake about "selective editing" of videos or speech transcripts, here is a link to the website of the NAACP, where they have made a point of posting the full video of Shirley Sherrod's speech. I have seen the entire speech as supplied by the NAACP. The now-famous speech runs just over 40 minutes. If you don't have the time, here is a link to the printed transcript of her speech supplied by a site called American Rhetoric Online Speech Bank. The transcript is taken in full from the video version of her speech, which American rhetoric also supplies. I have read the transcript as well.

Let's get to this.

In her speech, Ms. Sherrod says this:

I should tell you a little about Baker County. In case you don't know where it is, it's located less than 20 miles southwest of Albany.

[TigersEye]

This is a really outstanding article.

[Gene Eric]

I realize it’s more about the votes, but I don’t expect the politicians to make it otherwise. I’m obviously cynical about it. But as you suggested, it IS a complicated situation worth fighting for providing an effort is made on all sides.

I didn’t mean to imply “White guilt” other than to point out the apologies given by those overreacting to the “edited” video.

Yeah, I agree - we can debate this issue without our ballet shoes. And I believe we are.

[chuckles]

I think many of you are missing the point that want to drop the story. The woman has a flawed memory because she is flawed in her thinking. I grew up in the south and am old enough to remember the separate drinking fountains and restrooms. The "Solid South" was Democrat,...ALL DEMOCRAT. You couldn't be dog catcher without your Democrat papers. How in the world did blacks convince themselves that Republicans are the devil and Democrats will save them?

The point of the story is she is mistakenly blaming the wrong people for her woes. From the Republican Party's foundation for freeing slaves, to George Wallace standing in the school house doors while a Democrat, I can't fathom how any blacks can ever vote Democrat. Fulbright was Arkansas Governor when Ike( a Republican ) sent troops to integrate the schools there. Clinton received a Fulbright scholarship and Clinton was proud to accept it. Hugo Black and Senator Byrd are just stories that everyone should know but for some strange reason can't seem to connect the dots to the Democrat party. All this feeds into blacks having more abortions that any other race and Democrats seem to escape the genocide blame. The first gun control laws ( by Americans) were passed to keep blacks from owning guns after the Civil War. It goes on and on example after example that Democrats are racist and always have been. Segregation of the military was invented by Woodrow Wilson as we know now from Glenn Beck. This is real history and yet we focus on Breitbart and not hundreds of years of facts that seem to be swept under the rug.

The Bible talks of people with scales on their eyes and this is but one example. You can read a history book to some of these people and they will swear that Republicans are at the root of these acts. Try telling someone that Hitler was a Socialist and see their reaction. It's the same thing.

Truth matters. The fact that he family member was beaten instead of lynched is not the main aim of the story. It just shows she has been taught a certain way and is too blind to ever accept the truth. My friend's father was beaten to death by the police, but he doesn't say he was drowned or hanged or any other statement that isn't true. People like Ms. Sherrod have been conditioned to ignore the truth and cling to a lie. If she tells a story, you can almost bet that there will be problems to it.

[TigersEye]

3. It was not her father but another relative. This is important. It was a deliberate distortion of the truth.

Those are two different stories. She recounted them both. She didn't conflate the two in any distortion.

The main point of this article is not Sherrod's accuracy in story telling it is the fact that the Progressive Movement has used race-baiting to advance its big government socialist goals from the beginning. In the beginning it was Democrat racists who used hatred of blacks. Now it is Democrat racists who use hatred of whites.

Did anyone read this article?

[KTM rider]

I dont think Sherod lied here, (lynching schminching)in the context of the speech and the audience

Sherrod sounds like a racist to me , that is the result of resentment not being processed properly

resentment cultivated by a pop culture

In fact I see an analogy here to the Deepwater Horizon blowout and the resulting shift of burden to the guilty energy user as a ploy to pass cap and trade

but here we have a public official with a racism blowout, spewing out hate like a geyser, with the burden of guilt being instead shifted to the white man for reparations

[TigersEye]

Exactly! Someone who gets it.

[TNdandelion]

Exactly. Sounds to me like that only thing that didn't make this a "legal by the book lynching" was the fact that the lynchers wore police badges.

They picked him up in the middle of the night and beat him to death over a supposed theft of a tire. Nope...nothing sounds suspicious about that story.at.all. /sarc off

[TigersEye]

Apparently you don’t know what “lyinching” means even after dictionary definitions and a half dozen explanations.

[wiggen]

I really enjoyed the article but i had the same feeling about semantics. More to the point,i would say that to a person being murdered by a group over race is being lynched. Its the act,not the specific.

[golas1964]

Now, now. Don’t get all Shirley on us!

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

I think it’s rather generous to assume that she knows exactly what the word ‘lynching’ means.

Merriam-Webster: to put to death (as by hanging) by mob action without legal sanction

Whether or not three law enforcement officers constitute a mob is open to question, but certainly he was "put to death" without legal sanction. To the extent that her story was embellished, it was a very small embellishment. I give her a pass. I don't like her politics, but she seems to be attempting to be fair-minded.

[SkyPilot]

Fired USDA Employee Shirley Sherrod Received $150,000 in Minority Farm Lawsuit

Her racist husband also got $150,000 in cash, and her friends got $13 million in a race "lottery" case where the taxpayers were fleeced.

Hint.......follow the money into her and her husband's tax returns and see if they paid full taxes on that $300K "windfall."

[Homer1]

Let me add to the growing consensu here and say that this article is mean-sprited race-baiting garbage. American Spectator loses credibility in my eyes for publishing it.

[TexasFreeper2009]

lol

everyday a racial story is in the headlines Obama loses.

[drpix]

You have to read the entire article to get its point. Below from the last page is the article's point. It's a point worth making.

"First, she can visit the Supreme Court of the United States, and ponder the connection between progressivism and racism. Take a look inside the ornate chamber where on May 7, 1945, Justice Hugo Black, a lifetime member of the Ku Klux Klan honored with a lifetime seat on the Supreme Court, an honor made possible because he used his racism to support the New Deal, voted to overturn the conviction of Sheriff Claude Screws for beating Bobby Hall to death. "

"Then a short stroll adown the street and she can visit another of Capitol Hill's enduring monuments: The Richard B. Russell United States Senate Office Building. As she strolls down its old marble corridors, surrounded by the offices of powerful United States Senators and their staffs, she perhaps can take the time to reflect once again on the night her father was murdered. And that the very building in which she walks is named in honor of the progressive/racist Democrat who was without doubt responsible for helping lots of Georgia farmers on a scale even Sherrod might not be able to imagine. But to do that he had to help create and nurture the atmosphere that made her father's death..."

Just because the leftwing hordes, who now, foaming at the mouth, cry that Sherod's NAACP speech was "taken out of context" & "misrepresented" will now do just that with this article does NOT mean it should be pulled.

For opponents of the left to accept such double standards is the very purpose of their attacks. You can only beat them by defying them and this past script of backing down and accepting the rules of their rigged game. Keep hammering hard at their lies, half truths, reverse discrimination and racism - and Americans who have been forced to live with this, for too long, will recognize the truth.

[Brytani]

Sherrod’s entire family seems to have made a good living by suing the tax payers of this country.

Yes, her Uncle’s death was brutal and the result of institutionalized racism approved of, taught by, encouraged and in many cases facilitated by Democrats!

There should be no need for anyone on Free Republic to go through the history of the Klan and the Democrats, how they are for all intents and purposes being the same group group. There should also be no need to go into how Democrats used the Klan not only against blacks but also against Republicans in the South to prevent them from gaining any political power. Any conservative has no excuse for not knowing the dark history of the Democrat party.

Sherrod also has no excuse. She is an educated woman and is involved with civil rights. She knows the history of blacks as well as the history of the Klan. She and others like her engage in nothing but revisionist history and teach it to generation after generation of blacks. They game the system by pleading ignorance when needed and smear anyone who attempts to correct, or speak the truth, as racists.

Not only are average Americans cowering in fear at the thought of being called a racist; our judges and politicians know even the unfounded charge of racism will be the end of their career.

There is a large group of people in this country who are allowed to blackmail, extort, smear, libel, threaten and attack without any repercussions.

Until we figure out a way to remove the profit margin from racism, Sherrod and those like her will continue to make a good living off the backs of “racists”.

[driftdiver]

How does any of this change the fact Sherrod is a admitted racist and the NAACP laughed with her?

[reasonisfaith]

Of course Sherrod doesn’t mention the Democratic Party’s links to the Ku Klux Klan, or the fact that FDR appointed the Klan lawyer to the Supreme Court who rescued Bobby Hall’s murderers.

She doesn’t make these connections because they expose once again the fact that any leftist cause will always produce the opposite of its claimed agenda.

In other words, the Democratic Party is and always has been the party of hatred, racism and lies.

[libertarian27]

This article jumps all over the place. There's at least two articles smooshed into one. The Sherrod section is way over the top - the New Deal/Democrat/KKK connections - fine

The title is inflammatory-They need to change it... knitpicking the definition of 'lynching'? Come on!

Definitions of lynching on the Web:

* putting a person to death by mob action without due process of law

* Lynching is extrajudicial punishment carried out by a mob, usually by hanging in order to intimidate, control, or otherwise manipulate a population of people, however large or small. ...

* The general meaning is an execution by a mob. It is most often associated with the ritual murder of Blacks, especially by hanging, to maintain white supremacy through the use of terrorism. ...

[Red in Blue PA]

Agree. Nitpicking such as this only makes our side look bad.

There are battles to fight.....this is not one of them.