The Black History of the White House (55 page)

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 the 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.
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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.
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Lincoln also had created the USDA in 1862 referring to it as the “people's department.”
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Indeed, more than 40,000 African Americans had settled on confiscated land by June 1865.
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However, after Lincoln's assassination April 14, President Andrew Johnson rescinded the order in his effort to reintegrate southern rebels into the nation.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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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 the 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.
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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.
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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.

This coalition, albeit unstable, and the rise of non-state
actors—from human rights organizations to terrorist networks—have placed limits on the politics of force that characterized the Bush administration and the neoliberal wing of U.S. strategists. The adventurism of the latter, of course, generated conflicts that have become untenable and from which Obama desperately seeks extrication. The U.S. military is bogged down in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, neither of which will produce a decisive victory, nor can the U.S. agenda of political dominance impose the fiction of a stable democratization (or perhaps any democratization at all). More critically, although the U.S. military possesses a preponderance of hard power compared to other major states, it is shamelessly bloated, perpetually demoralized, politically curtailed, and financially unviable; no competitor nation incurs expenditures and debt even remotely approaching those of the United States.

Regional mobilization by social democratic forces in Latin America and aspiring democratic movements in Africa and Asia have also reduced the U.S. footprint in those areas. Given BRIC efforts to increase its economic influence and positioning in Latin America and Africa, and the eager receptivity of a number of states, the United States must scramble to maintain, let alone expand, its current geostrategic posture. Some U.S. political and military leaders, including Obama, recognize that the future will witness a reconfigured global balance in those areas. Middle East politics are no less complicated, as allies in the region and contiguous South Asia, such as Egypt, Israel, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, exhibit little ability to act as legitimate surrogates for policies that are anathema to political leaders and popular opinion on nearly all of the key debates.

Domestically, Obama confronts a unified opposition that is willing to harm the nation's interests in order to bring down his presidency. During his first two years in office, Obama has
received near zero support by the Republicans in Congress for any of his major initiatives. Opposition is based on the cynical and irresponsible notion that defeating Obama's agenda, regardless of its merits, is the only path back to congressional and perhaps presidential power. Anger at the state of the nation, coupled with real and constructed fears, has given rise to a broad antigovernment social movement composed of a wide range of social and ideological forces, including the disjointed tea party network that in itself is politically diverse. Within this movement, forms of mild to virulent racism have emerged that some in the movement have denounced but most national tea party leaders have ignored, been defensive about, or winked at. A major dynamic targets Obama personally and (racialized) immigrants and black and Hispanic communities in general. It is difficult for the conservative movement to divorce itself from these elements, because it has cultivated racist stereotypes from the days of the “Southern strategy,” Willie Horton, and “white hands” advertisements up to the fictions about welfare queens and Obama's birth certificate.