From here.  Hat Tip: JRK

She was smeared by right-wing media, condemned by the NAACP, and canned by the Obama administration. It wasn’t pretty, what was done this week to Shirley Sherrod.

And maybe something good can come of it. The thought occurred to me after reading her now-famous speech, which is about the power of grace and the possibility of redemption.

Here’s a way to get some good. This September, when school begins, we should make the speech required viewing in the nation’s high schools. It packs quite a lesson within quite a story.

You know the essential facts. On March 27, Ms. Sherrod, 62, Georgia director of rural development for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, spoke at an NAACP meeting in Coffee County, Ga. She was dressed in a dark suit with ivory lapels and cuffs, and the impression she gives in the video is of a person of authority. She came across like a person who has lived a life, not a media knock-off of a life but a real one.

And this is what she said. Forty-five years before, to the day, her father’s funeral was held. He had been murdered by a white man in Baker County, Ga. These were still the bad old days; lynchings had taken place in her lifetime. The man who murdered her father “was never punished,” even though there were three eyewitnesses. The grand jury refused to indict.

There’s good stuff here. Read it carefully and read it all.