Who should we believe: Shirley Sherrod or Eloise Spooner, the wife of the ‘white farmer’?

Sherrod and Spooner tell significantly different versions of story about the Spooners almost losing their farm.

In both versions, Sherrod eventually helped the Spooners after Sherrod saw how a lawyer she’d sent them to wasn’t helping.

In Sherrod’s version, the lawyer who didn’t help the Spooners is white. As Sherrod puts it in her speech, ‘one of his own kind.’

Sherrod’s story is the story that the world knows. It’s got two white characters in it. Neither presented to NAACP audience in a good light. Spooner is presented as arrogant. Sherrod describes him as ‘acting superior.’ Then, there’s the white lawyer who doesn’t help the Spooners. Sherrod tells the NAACP crowd that this shocks her.

That’s the story Sherrod told the NAACP audience. It’s been repeated over and over by everyone in the media.

I’ve already written about Sherrod’s claim that Spooner was ‘acting superior.’ Sherrod herself admits that this wasn’t true, twice, in her book The Courage To Hope. Sherrod’s portrayal of Spooner to the NAACP audience was false.

But what about the lawyer who didn’t help the Spooners?

According to Eloise Spooner, the attorney who didn’t help the Spooners was black.

Spooner didn’t say this in some obscure backwoods daily a few days ago.

Spooner told her story in the Washington Post. In July, 2010.

It’s a direct contraction to what Sherrod told the NAACP audience.

According to Eloise Spooner, the Spooners met with Sherrod who suggested two lawyers. The Spooners chose a black attorney in Albany, Georgia. The struggled to pay him and after six months, the black attorney had done nothing to help.

That’s when Sherrod stepped in to help; apparently with a white attorney.

Let’s compare the two versions.

In her infamous 2010 speech to an NAACP meeting, Shirley told a story where white people are the problem:

The first time I was faced with having to help a white farmer save his farm, he — he took a long time talking, but he was trying to show me he was superior to me. I know what he was doing. But he had come to me for help. What he didn’t know while he was taking all that time trying to show me he was superior to me, was I was trying to decide just how much help I was going to give him.

I was struggling with the fact that so many black people have lost their farmland, and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land. So, I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough so that when he — I — I assumed the Department of Agriculture had sent him to me, either that or the — or the Georgia Department of Agriculture. And he needed to go back and report that I did try to help him.

So I took him to a white lawyer that we had — that had…attended some of the training that we had provided, ’cause Chapter 12 bankruptcy had just been enacted for the family farmer. So I figured if I take him to one of them that his own kind would take care of him.

These details are directly contradicted by the story Eloise Spooner told the Washington Post:

(An attorney) said I’m gonna give you one more number for someone who could help you. That number was Shirley Sherrod. So we talked to her and we went up there to Albany, Ga. She said we’ve got two lawyers: one is a black lawyer and his name was Black and the other was Dan Easterlin in Americus, Ga.

We said we’d just try this one in Albany. So we went to see him and we had to scrape up some money. We went to him for six months. But he wasn’t getting anything accomplished.

After about six months, he said he couldn’t help us on our case, that he had another client. I called Shirley and told her and she asked me if she wanted us to call the other one. She asked us if we wanted her to go with us and we told her yes. She went up there two or three times.

We told Mr. Easterlin that we had some rough nights and couldn’t sleep because we were worried and Mr. Easterlin told us to go home and get a good night’s sleep and he’d take care of that. He managed to get us a Chapter 11 and we got that all settled. Then it began to level off, everything got better.

That was just about two weeks before they were gonna sell our farm up at the courthouse. He got the Chapter 11 to stop it and Shirley Sherrod arranged it all and got it going. We would have lost everything if it hadn’t been for Shirley.

Which story is true?

Sherrod’s or Spooner’s?

If Spooner’s detailed account is true, why would Shirley Sherrod tell the NAACP crowd a story that makes the white farmer look arrogant and the white lawyer look lazy and greedy?

Why did Sherrod tell the NAACP audience that she took Spooner ‘to one of his own kind’ if she gave the Spooners two options and they went with the black attorney?

Or did Eloise Spooner get his totally wrong?

Someone needs to ask Shirley Sherrod.

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