Listen Live
WOLB Featured Video
CLOSE

From Southernstudies.org:

Right now, if you do a web search of the words “racism” and “USDA,” the majority of links will steer you to coverage of this week’s Shirley Sherrod affair, in which the African-American U.S. Department of Agriculture staffer based in Georgia resigned after a conservative website reversed the meaning of a speech she gave last year to imply she would deny farm loans to whites.

It’s an astonishing development given the history of race relations at the USDA, an agency whose own Commission on Small Farmsadmitted in 1998 that “the history of discrimination at the U.S. Department of Agriculture … is well-documented” — not against white farmers, but African-American, Native American and other minorities who were pushed off their land by decades of racially-biased laws and practices.

Click here to read more

Click here for our gallery of healthcare issues

RELATED:

Black Farmers Blamed for Failed Settlement

Shirley Sherrod Claims White House Forced Her to Resign