all the same, she was forced out of her job with the agriculture department. then as the facts came out, an embarrassed white house had to issue an apology to sherrod. for the next half hour, you re going to meet a humble and remarkable woman who did everything right but still, fell victim to a vicious smear. i spent the day with her to find out, who is shirley sherrod? afterwards we ll have a panel discussion on what her experience reveals about race in america. shirley sherrod was accused of racism. you reach out to her and say, what are you talking about? when did this happen? did you discriminate? shirley sherrod caught on tape saying something very disturbing. i said, get the whole tape and look at the whole tape. we begin with the smearing of shirley sherrod. this is showing racism at an naacp event. he didn t care who he destroyed. ms. sherrod must resign immediately. no one wanted to hear the truth. i don t know what brought up the racist mess. this is a
that we were undertaking to fight. reporter: across the south, white officials were using every trick in the book to keep civil rights activists in check. to keep black voters from turning out. that helped set the stage for a violent confrontation as demonstrators began to gather here at the courthouse in downtown newton on a day that became known as bloody saturday. i saw some whites coming out of the hardware store with ax handles. and they approached us and started beating us with the ax handles. they beat us down into the ground. hand my aunt jo, she was a little petite woman, she put her body over his and was hollering at them to stop beating charles sherrod because they were going to kill him. reporter: but that didn t
before he was president sean bell was shot in the streets and instead of speaking to power he said we should respect the jury s verdict. he gave what i call the philadelphia compromise where instead of really talking about the danger of white supremacy he made it seem as a white angst were the same as black angst and that s sim lot not true. now there are moments where with the skip gates controversy i would say he handled it properly. i want to move on because i want to talk about the zrivs blogger. i want to talk about the naacp. the administration many feel they threw ms. sherrod under the bus and the same with some african-american commentators who all commented in the beginning before they heard the entire clip, cheryl. so there are many who are not sure how they feel about these organizations right now. absolutely. the challenge for the naacp at this point is reaching the new
principal s office. i was such a good girl. good student. i couldn t figure out why they were calling me to the office. but i went. they told me first that he had been shot. reporter: the murder that changed shirley sherrod s life forever. when we come back. that s why we created the tide loads of hope program, a free laundry service that provides clean clothes to families affected by disasters. [ woman ] it feels so good to be able to know that i ve got clean clothes. you don t know how very basic essentials are until you have none. this is what gives us hope. [ female announcer ] you too can join us by purchasing a tide vintage t at tideloadsofhope.com.
racism, they were following the lead of black bloggers who have been calling for this for over a year. they initially were initially received a strong response from black bloggers. now the hip-hop generation has soured somewhat. then you have shirley sherrod who represents the current membership of the naacp. she s 62, she s in that age. women like shirley sherrod are the unsung heroes of the civil rights movement. they are the bridge between the old jim crowe world, or a world they helped to create. the challenge for the naacp is how do they keep shirley sherrod basically engaged in their struggle. marc, so where do we go from here? when we ran earlier, a section a portion of the someone said to me maybe this will open up and we ll start talking more about it and it will change things. and i said, we said that after the election of the first black president and nothing happened. now we have this moment.