UNITED STATES - White House apologises to ousted worker

WASHINGTON (AP):

An embarrassed White House has apologised to a black Agriculture Department employee who was ousted for her remarks about race, acknowledging that officials did not know all the facts when she was fired.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs called the dismissal of Shirley Sherrod an injustice and a mistake. He said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack was trying to reach her yesterday to extend the administration's apology.

"I accept the apology," Sherrod said on CNN after watching Gibbs talk to reporters.

Gibbs said President Barack Obama has been briefed on the situation. Earlier, a White House official said Obama had not spoken with Sherrod about the controversy.

Sherrod was asked by department officials to resign on Monday after conservative bloggers posted an edited video of her saying she did not initially give a white farmer as much help as she could have 24 years ago, when she was working for a farmers' aid group. Sherrod says the video distorted her full speech.

The White House called the Agriculture Department about the case Tuesday night and it was agreed that her ouster should be reviewed because of new evidence.

Gibbs said people in the administration and outside of it acted without all the facts.

The incident is the latest in a series of race-related issues that have garnered national attention since Obama took office as America's first black president.

Sherrod's dismissal had been the talk of cable news shows and has been debated on conservative and liberal blogs.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson, a prominent civil-rights leader, called on the administration yesterday to apologise for Sherrod's treatment.

He said the case was even "more egregious" than last year's controversy, in which Obama criticised a white police officer for his arrest of black Harvard University scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr.

That uproar led to a widely publicised "beer summit," in which Obama invited Gates and the officer, Sgt James Crowley, to the White House.

The latest incident stems from remarks Sherrod made in March at a banquet of a local chapter of the NAACP, a major civil-rights organisation.

Help

In the two-minute, 38-second clip posted Monday by BigGovernment.com, Sherrod described the first time a white farmer came to her for help. It was 1986, and she worked for a rural farm aid group. She said the farmer came in acting "superior" to her and she debated how much help to give him.

Initially, she said, "I didn't give him the full force of what I could do" and only gave him enough help to keep his case progressing. Eventually, she said, his situation "opened my eyes" that whites were struggling just like blacks, and helping farmers wasn't so much about race but was "about the poor versus those who have".

The video immediately caused an uproar and led to her condemnation by the NAACP. She was pressured by superiors to resign her position as the Agriculture Department's director of rural development in the southern state of Georgia.

Sherrod said her remarks were part of a larger story about learning from her mistakes and racial reconciliation, not racism. She said they were taken out of context by bloggers who posted only part of her speech.

The NAACP, after posting the full video of Sherrod's remarks, said it had been duped by the conservative website and that she should keep her job.