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Shirley Sherrod on Healing From Injustice

In the summer of 2010, Shirley Sherrod was fired from her position as the Georgia U.S.D.A. State Director of Rural Development, when a right-wing blogger, Andrew Breitbart, doctored a videotape to make it appear that Ms. Sherrod was making racist remarks about a white farmer in a speech to the N.A.A.C.P. chapter in Coffee County, Georgia.

Breitbart’s maliciousness was quickly exposed. Ms. Sherrod received apologies from her bosses, and President Barack Obama. She was offered another position in the administration, but she chose to turn that offer down. 

More than three years later, Sherrod tells Maryland Morning's Tom Hall her takeaway from the incident, and what she is currently doing for Georgia farmers. Sherrod chronicled the Breitbart incident, and many other life experiences in her book, The Courage to Hope: How I Stood Up to the Politics of Fear.

Sherrod and her husband Charles (both longtime civil rights activists) now lead the Southwest Georgia Project, which works primarily with women farmers, and New Communities, an agricultural training center in Georgia modeled on the concept of the Israeli Kibbutz.

This segment originally aired on January 15, 2014.

Host, Midday (M-F 12:00-1:00)
Jamyla Krempel is WYPR's digital content director and the executive producer of Wavelength: Baltimore's Public Radio Journey. She collaborates with reporters, program and podcast hosts to create content for WYPR’s online platforms.