Charles Sherrod, civil rights activist with SNCC, dies
The Rev. Charles Sherrod, a front-line warrior for civil rights who became the first field secretary of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, braving beatings and death threats in the early 1960s while trying to desegregate a Southern stronghold of white supremacy, died Oct. 11 at his home in Albany, Ga., where he had worked for more than six decades. He was 85.
His death was announced in a statement by his family, which did not cite a cause.
A founding member of SNCC, the leading student group of the 1960s civil rights movement, Sherrod collaborated with prominent organizers including Ella Baker — who helped him pay off his college loans — and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who joined him for about eight months in Albany as part of a campaign to end racial segregation in the region, which was notorious for its police brutality, Ku Klux Klan violence and whites-only voter rolls.
While King left Albany in disappointment, believing that the movement had failed to accomplish any of its major goals, Sherrod stayed behind, campaigning for desegregation and voter registration as head of the Southwest Georgia Project for Community Education. He later went into politics, serving as one of Albany’s first Black city commissioners, and co-founded a farm collective called New Communities, which was often described as the country’s largest Blackowned farm and first community land trust.
“Sherrod is an exemplar of those people who didn’t leave the movement,” said Clayborne Carson, a historian of the civil rights movement, in a 2010 interview with the news website Salon. “They stayed, and they’re still fighting, to this day.”
Raised in Virginia by his maternal grandmother, who encouraged him to become a Baptist minister, Sherrod earned a master’s degree in sacred theology and quoted from scripture at rallies and marches. By the time he became the first full-time field secretary for SNCC in 1961, he had acquired a reputation as something of a “country mystic, deeply religious with a stubborn streak,” according to civil rights historian Taylor Branch’s book “Parting the Waters: American in the King Years 1954-63” (1988).
Although he was often warm and gentle, even soft-spoken, Sherrod could quickly change into a fiery, confrontational organizer — as when he spoke with Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in June 1961, joining other SNCC organizers in pleading for help on behalf of the Freedom Riders.
Meeting with Sherrod and several other activists in his office, Kennedy said they should stop worrying about the riders, who were being jailed and attacked by white mobs while riding buses across the South. They should focus instead on voter registration, he said.
Sherrod, who was then 24, erupted in anger, stepping toward Kennedy until another activist coaxed him back to his seat, according to Branch’s account. “You,” he said, “are a public official, sir. It’s not your responsibility before God or under the law to tell us how to honor our constitutional rights. It’s your job to protect us when we do.” (Kennedy was unswayed by his argument.)
That fall, Sherrod was dispatched by SNCC to Albany, where he slowly began to win over members of the Black community while teaching workshops on nonviolent resistance. “Albany was the kind of town where everybody knew their place,” he told The Washington Post decades later. “Black people were afraid to talk to me. Some were even so fearful that if I was walking on one side of the street, they would go on the other side.”
Working with fellow SNCC organizer Cordell Reagon, he started to gain their trust. In November, the organizers sent nine college students to conduct a sit-in at the local bus terminal, an action that helped kick off the Albany Movement, as the campaign became known. King arrived in December, and over the coming months they organized songfilled demonstrations, seeking to end legally sanctioned racial discrimination in the city and surrounding counties.
The reaction from the white establishment was swift. Black churches were burned in retaliation, and more than 1,000 African Americans were jailed, many by Albany police officers overseen by Chief Laurie Pritchett. The chief maintained a peaceful image, seeking to avoid violent clashes and thus minimize news coverage of the protests. Privately, he told the reverend, “Sherrod, it’s just a matter of mind over matter. I don’t mind and you don’t matter.”
Sherrod witnessed multiple attacks by law enforcement, and said he was nearly beaten to death in the nearby town of Newton, where he was attacked outside the courthouse by a group of young white men wielding ax handles. He was saved by an older woman who wrapped herself around him, using her body as a shield — a technique that he had taught in his workshops on protest tactics.
As the months went by, the arrests and attacks took a toll on the activists. King announced an end to his demonstrations in August 1962, later saying he made a mistake in protesting segregation as a whole rather than focusing on a single institution like the bus system.
Yet the protests in Albany were later credited with laying the groundwork for subsequent civil rights demonstrations, including in Birmingham, Ala. And to Sherrod, the movement was far from a defeat: Segregation statutes were taken off the books the next year, and African Americans increasingly gained political power.
“They don’t talk about the unity we had. About the strength we had for the first time,” he said in a 1985 interview for “Eyes on the Prize,” a television documentary about the movement. “They talk about failure. Where’s the failure? Are we not integrated in everyw facet? Did we stop at any time? What stopped us? Did any injunction stop us? Did any white man stop us? Did any Black man stop us?
“Nothing stopped us in Albany, Georgia. We showed the world.”
Charles Melvin Sherrod was born in rural Surry, Va., on Jan. 2, 1937. His mother was 14, so and he and his younger siblings grew up with extended family in nearby Petersburg, where his maternal grandmother was a domestic and his mother found work at a tobacco factory, according to historian Ansley L. Quiros’s book “God With Us” (2018).
Sherrod studied sociology at Virginia Union University, a historically Black school in Richmond, and stayed to study theology after graduating in 1958. By then he was also involved in civil rights activism, participating in a “kneel-in” at a whites-only church and a sit-in at a downtown restaurant.
In 1960, he traveled to Shaw University in North Carolina for a civil rights conference that led to the creation of SNCC. The next year, he joined fellow organizers in protesting segregation in Rock Hill, S.C., where he was arrested and refused bail, serving 30 days of hard labor on a chain gang. It was there, he said in a 2011 interview for the Civil Rights History Project, that he steeled himself for future attacks, deciding that “nothing but death could stop me from the mission that I had.”
Sherrod took a break from SNCC to study for his master’s degree at Union Theological Seminary in New York. He graduated in 1966 and left the civil rights organization around that same time, dismayed by the more militant stance the group was adopting under new leader Stokely Carmichael, who moved to expel White members.
That same year, he married Shirley Miller, who had turned toward activism as a teenager after her father was fatally shot by a white man who was never indicted. She joined Sherrod and several others in co-founding the agricultural group New Communities, purchasing a 5,735-acre farm and developing plans to turn it into a haven for displaced Black families to live and work.
In addition to his wife, of Albany, survivors include two children, Russia Sherrod of Albany and Kenyatta Sherrod of Marietta, Ga.; three brothers; a sister; and five grandchildren.
“They talk about failure. Where’s the failure? Are we not integrated in every facet? Did we stop at any time? What stopped us? Did any injunction stop us? Did any white man stop us? Did any Black man stop us?”
THE REV. CHARLES SHERROD IN A 1985 INTERVIEW FOR “EYES ON THE PRIZE”