Albany, Georgia is my birthplace and the central setting for my upcoming debut novel, The Peach Seed. No matter where I’ve lived, I’ve always made a point of visiting home at least once a year.
Albany is rich in civil rights history. Many, many undertold and untold stories still wait to enter the world’s light. I was honored to meet a monumental human rights activist with such a story: the Rev. Charles Sherrod, who passed away this past October. In March 2011 I made the first of many trips home dedicated to research for the novel; to immerse in place, look at if purely from a writer’s POV. During that trip I learned that in June, the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) Southwest Georgia Civil Rights Movement would be celebrating its 50th Anniversary. My novel flashes back to this important era and places fictional characters inside this little known iconic movement. So naturally, I made the trip back in June. That’s when I first met Rev. Sherrod.
A vibrant group gathered to celebrate in Hyper Gym on campus at Albany State University. What a super-charged, enlightening time that was; getting to know many people who had lived the lives I was fictionalizing in my novel. So many unsung icons.
Rev. Sherrod’s wife, Shirley Miller Sherrod, graciously granted me permission to share this blog post along with photos and a video I took at the anniversary, published here for the first time anywhere.
“…I am happy that you have chosen to do a blog post honoring my husband. Because he was not the person to seek credit for everything he did, so many are just learning about his contributions.”
Shirley Sherrod, 2023
1960s
Charles Melvin Sherrod was born on January 2, 1937, in Surry, Virginia. He was 23 years old on February 1, 1960 when four Black college students sat down at segregated lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C. and refused to leave. Sherrod felt the ripple two hundred miles away in Richmond, Virginia, where he was a student himself, at Virginia Union University studying religion.
Two months later, on Easter weekend, 1960, in response to the sit-in ripple, the iconic Ella Baker, then Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) Executive Director, issued a “seize the day” call to bring together young protest leaders to learn from veterans. Charles Sherrod was one of 126 student delegates to answer that call. A year later, he would serve 30 days in The Rock Hill Prison Farm, arrested for trespassing at McCrory’s lunch counter where. Sherrod was joined by Diane Nash, Ruby Doris Smith and Charles Jones in exercising the newly adopted “Jail-No-Bail” tactic. Sherrod turned down a teaching career at his alma mater to work as a full-time field secretary for SNCC. Ella Baker assigned him to southwest Georgia.
Photos above and below: 1961, Rev. Sherrod in southwest Georgia (SOWEGA) working as SNCC’s first full-time field secretary: Danny Lyon, from his book: Memories of the Southern Civil Rights Movement
“It was just a great joy,” Rev. Sherrod said in a 2011 Library of Congress interview, “to find the same old people, bent over, talking with their heads down, were now talking with their heads up, and speaking to white people without fear, and demonstrating, going in the store … trying on a hat, and picketing stores who would not change in their morals.”
Rev. Charles Sherrod
Guerrilla Lifestyle
On Saturday, June 4, 2011, I was honored when Rev. Sherrod granted me a 15-minute interview at the 50th celebration. He spoke about what an average day might look like for young people —both locals and transplants—willing to risk their lives in the fight for human rights in the SNCC movement.
As Tom Ricks points out in his 2022 book, Waging a Good War, “The purpose of the freedom Rides was, like a military raid, to carry the flag of the cause into perviously untouched areas, even into the Deep South.” Rev. Sherrod was deep in the trenches, leading the charge. He said, “If they couldn’t take the threats of violence or actual violence of any sort then they could not work here.” Because they faced some kind of violence everyday in the guerrilla lifestyle they had chosen. “You might be sleeping in a car tonight or on a porch tomorrow…”
The Sherrods went on to build The Southwest Georgia Project, a non-profit devoted to issues from welfare rights to Black land loss, and New Communities, the largest Black farm cooperative and first community land trust in the United States.
Testimonials
| —Peter deLissovoy, contributor to and editor of the book, The Great Pool Jump & Other Stories from the Civil Rights Movement in Southwest Georgia: |
| “Charles Sherrod was one of the original brave SNCC “apostles” who went into the Deep South starting about 1960 to start up the voter registration drives and stir up protests against segregation. Charles Sherrod was the first in the modern Civil Rights Movement to hit on the idea of bringing in white kids in numbers as volunteers in the effort to revolutionize the Deep South, around 1961. Later his idea was expanded in SNCC’s Mississippi Summer of 1964 and elsewhere. When SNCC decided to kick out the whites, Sherrod didn’t go along with this and broke away, founding the Southwest Georgia Project, which has existed till today, under one name or another, and is really the longest running SNCC project. Sherrod led with a kind of quiet dignity. He knew the outcome of the registration activity and marches might be going to jail, and he went to jail; he inspired by example. People witnessed his personal bravery, and they followed. Sherrod was a beautiful singer. I heard Sherrod sing many times at mass meetings, weddings, and for no reason at all. He had a lovely voice. Once I heard Sherrod and Emory Harris stop in the hallway of Albany city hall and break into the most haunting version of “Cotton-Eyed Joe.” It’s no accident that the leaders of the 1960s like Martin Luther King and Charles Sherrod and Reverend Samuel B. Wells were Christian preachers because it took a peculiar wholeness of spirit, vision, and strength beyond personal resources to maintain something like the Movement in the American Deep South in the face of the violent opposition there. He had that ultimate faith and vision.” Photo Below: L: Randy Battle R: Peter deLissovoy in Albany, Ga, December 2004 |
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—The late Randy Battle:
“Charles Sherrod taught me to read and gave me my education—I mean my formal education now, not about life, me and life took care a that! I couldn’t go to school much when I was little. I started picking cotton when I was six years old, seems to me. Or maybe it was before. Everybody went to the cottonfields then in my neighborhood. I went to about third grade in school. Sherrod now and then in the evenings when the day’s work was done would give me my tutoring lesson in the old SNCC office.
Sherrod was my mentor and I owe him a lot. I would read things he gave me to read and I would keep track of words I didn’t know and he would tell me their meaning. Or I’d look them up in the dictionary. Actually, I learned to read then, in the Movement. The Movement was my whole course of education, because I didn’t get far in school. Sherrod taught me to read—and I read every book and novel the white kids brought down South with them, Jack Kerouac, Richard Wright, everything, I read every one I saw. Sherrod had the love and took the time to start me out.”
—The late Howard Zinn from his book, SNCC: The New Abolitionists:
“In 1961, Charles Sherrod, twenty-two, and Cordell Reagon, eighteen, veterans of the sit-ins, the Freedom Rides . . . arrived by bus in Albany to set up a voter registration office. Two months later Albany was the scene of unprecedented mass arrests . . . [T]hey came preceded by their reputations as Freedom Riders and agitators with whom it was dangerous to associate . . . and came to be loved with the adoration bestowed on folk heroes. . . . [They] wanted to return, it seemed, to the source of their people’s agony, to the heart of the slave plantation system, in order to cleanse it once and for all time. Albany was the old trading center for the slave plantation country of southwest Georgia, and though it was now becoming modern and commercial . . . it was surrounded by the past. . . . [T]he mass of the Negro population held back, remained silent. It was this screen of silence which SNCC organizers Sherrod and Reagon were determined to penetrate. Sherrod says:
When we first came to Albany, the people were afraid, really afraid . . . people walking would go across the street from us because they were afraid . . . Many ministers were afraid to let us use their churches, afraid their churches would be bombed. . . . [W]e knew we must cut through that fear. We thought and we thought . . . and the students were the answer.”
2011 SNCC Reunion
I first met Rev. Sherrod in June, 2011 at the 50th SNCC reunion. He was a gentle, soft-spoken man whose voice resounded and empowered. He has left us with a lasting legacy and blueprint. In an upcoming post I will share original 2012 photos from Resora, the Sherrods’ beautiful new location for New Communities: a 1,638 acre former plantation near Albany that was originally owned by one of the largest slaveholder estates in Georgia. Resora is both retreat/conference center and working farm. As the new stewards of this land embodying the spirits of many indigenous and enslaved peoples, the Sherrods tapped into Native American and Black ceremonies deeply rooted in the soil to bless the land for new generations. Shirley Sherrod said, “a place where we could both farm the land and also nurture the minds of people.”
Penny Patch
A SNCC veteran who worked in Albany in the 60s during the Movement. Shown here with me and her seven year old granddaughter, Luna Williams at the 50th Anniversary.
According to SNCC Digital Gateway, when Patch was eighteen, she was recruited from Swarthmore College to work in the integrated field project in Southwest GA started by Rev. Sherrod and his team. In June 1962, she became the first white woman to work on a SNCC field project in the Deep South.
She “learned to cook, type…drive a car, listen and persuade, develop strategy, organize people to register to vote and go on demonstrations, act independently if necessary, speak in public, and keep working despite fear and exhaustion.”
Carrying on in the footsteps of her grandmother, Patch reports that Luna, is now eighteen, in college, and a force with strong commitments to racial justice, women’s rights, and LGBTQ rights. Luna especially remembers the charge that Rev. Charles Sherrod laid on the group of young people at the reunion. He called them all up to the front of the auditorium.
“He told us it was up to us to carry the work forward and he also told us not to smoke and drink.”
Luna Williams
Video Below: Miss Rutha Mae Harris, Bernice Johnson Reagon and Charles Neblett — three of the Original Freedom Singers — are joined by more recent members: Erma Wilburn, Angelia Gibson, and others leading the audience in “This Lil’ Light of Mine”. The video ends with “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize”.
Video recorded by Anita Gail Jones