The Association for the Study of African American Life and History and the worldwide freedom struggle lost a great champion on October 11, 2022, with the passing of the Reverend Mr. Charles Melvin Sherrod. Sherrod, born into a family with deep roots in Surry County, Virginia’s Black freedom struggle. He tackled the terrorism of Jim Crow with a confrontational nonviolence: “we were going to break the system down from within,” he insisted. It is hard to imagine anyone more fierce, joyful, or devoted to bringing the US closer to its promise of equality.
When the sit-ins began in 1960, Sherrod was a college student at Virginia Union University, where he led a nonviolent direct action to integrate Thalheimer’s department store in Richmond. He later traveled from Virginia to Mississippi to Albany, Georgia as part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). From the beginning in 1961, his creativity and eloquence led others to recognize him as a practical and theological genius. His use of nonviolence was always militantly confrontational: through three decades the1960s, 1970s, and into the 1980s, Sherrod served as a general, waging direct actions against the white supremacist power structure in the city of Albany, Georgia and its using non-violence strategically to build an egalitarian community.
“We have constitutional rights, and we intend to use them,” he informed Albany’s police chief Laurie Pritchett. He prepared movement activists by explaining to them that Pritchett and his deputies would try incite “violence among us,” to discredit the Albany Campaign. Sherrod explained that white supremacist law enforcement could not break young people, “if we confronted them with love. That’s what we were talking about, confronting them with peace and expecting peace.” Consequently, activists all throughout the South and other parts of the United States sought him out as an organizing mentor in direct action and political campaigns.
“People were the main ingredients in our success,” Sherrod noted, for “people can move mountains.” As activists listened, experimented, and built trust, they realized that “young people are leaders. The lady on the street who helps people get the services they need is a leader. Ministers are leaders.” Learning from Ella J. Baker to build within this model of group leadership, his work spread through those he mentored in the educational reform, prison justice, immigration rights, healthcare access, and gender equity movements.
Sherrod possessed a remarkable capacity to face fear head-on. And he inspired others to do the same. His grit became legendary as, again and again, racists shot into his house, firebombed movement gatherings, and ambushed him on lonely highways. He knew “there’s got to be some settling done there, some coming to terms with your insides.” His friend and compatriot, Bernard Lafayette, recalled that “Instead of having our lives taken from us, we decided we were going to give our lives.” SNCC activists reached a state in which “death no longer becomes a factor.” It was a fierce determination that inspired people throughout the US, and documentary evidence now shows how Sherrod’s Albany model provided a blueprint for global democratic movements.
Sherrod’s persistence and dignity informed his organizing. It additionally fortified the generation of Black citizens born at the nadir of Jim Crow. As Sherrod observed, if some had previously moved “bent over, talking with their heads down” to whites, after watching their own kids work with SNCC, they “were now talking with their heads up, and speaking to white people without fear, demonstrating, going in the store and taking, trying on a hat, and picketing stores who would not change their morals.” Direct action, enacted with love, electrified Albany as it confounded local law enforcement. It mystified New York Times reporter Clyde Sitton, who came back time and again to report on Sherrod and SNCC in Southwest Georgia, sharing the tales of SNCC’s tactics nationally. Sherrod’s activism reframed Sitton’s reporting. The Times headlines that initially read “National Guard Called Out in Racial Unrest” in 1961 turned, by mid-1962, into “Sherriff Harasses Negroes at Voting Rally in Georgia.”
Years later, when asked to explain his inimitable uses of nonviolence, Sherrod spoke of his family’s legacy, his grandmother’s stories of his great-grandfather who protested a lynching and was subsequently forced into exile out of Virginia. The legacy that his grandfather held was one in which a Black person did not have to fear or have dread over their very existence. It was this legacy that encouraged his great-grandson to enjoin the Civil Rights movement to make democracy a reality.
Sherrod stories are renowned within the freedom movement. His witty wisecracks brightened and eased the edgiest confrontation. He and other SNCC Freedom Singers in Albany like Rutha Mae Harris and Bernice Johnson Reagon reworked the spirituals with lyrics that emboldened protesters in songs like, “Woke up this morning with my mind stayed on Jesus,” to “Woke up this morning with my mind stayed on Freedom.”
Eventually settling down roots in Albany, Sherrod contributed, over six decades, to an astonishing range of projects. In 1969, Sherrod and his wife, the prominent agricultural expert Shirley Miller Sherrod, and some other members of the Albany Movement helped pioneer the land trust movement in the US, co-founding New Communities, an agricultural collective in Southwest Georgia modeled on kibbutzim in Israel. New Communities became the nation’s largest Black-owned farm and first community land trust. The work Sherrod and others started in Albany pushed the movement into 15 different counties throughout southwest Georgia where Black officials predominated by the turn of the twenty-first century. Elected to Albany City Council from 1976 to 1990, Sherrod also served as chaplain at the Georgia State Prison in Homerville, and worked as a professor at Albany State University.
Planting freedom seeds in barren soil, he both inspired and co-created a rich heritage of “beloved community” in his tireless pursuit of justice. Freedom fighters from around the world celebrate his life and mourn his passing. His work remains a beacon of hope and strength as one of the most talented organizers of the Civil Rights generation and in our ongoing freedom struggles today.
Wesley Hogan
John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute
Duke University