Charles Sherrod

Charles Melvin Sherrod (January 2, 1937 – October 11, 2022) was an American minister and civil rights activist.

During the civil rights movement, Sherrod helped found the Albany Movement while serving as field secretary for southwest Georgia for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

He also participated in the Selma Voting Rights Movement and in many other campaigns of the civil rights movement of that era.

Sherrod's activism continued throughout his life through the Southwest Georgia Project for Community Education (SWGAP), New Communities, and as an Albany City Council Member.

He was married to former U.S. Department of Agriculture official Shirley Sherrod.

Sherrod was born in Surry, Virginia, and was raised by his Baptist grandmother.

When he was a young boy, he sang in a choir and attended Sunday school at a Baptist church.

When he was older he became a preacher at Mount Olivet Baptist Church, where he often preached to children.

Sherrod first took part in the civil rights movement after the Supreme Court of the United States desegregated public schools in the Brown v. Board of Education case.

In 1954, Sherrod first participated in sit-ins at white churches with the goal to desegregate them.

He was a key member and organizer of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the civil rights movement.

He became the first SNCC field secretary and SNCC director for southwest Georgia.

Sherrod joined SNCC in 1961 when it was recruiting new students to join in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

During this time Sherrod was at Virginia Union University in Richmond, Virginia.

He was offered a job as a teacher but turned it down so he could be a part of SNCC in Rock Hill, South Carolina.

In 1961 he was among four students, along with Diane Nash, J. Charles Jones, and Ruby Doris Smith, to drop out of college to become full-time civil rights activists and members of SNCC.

When the four arrived in Rock Hill, they almost immediately engaged in sit-ins to fight back against segregation.

After only one day in Rock Hill all four were arrested because of a sit-in they had participated in at a local diner.

They were sentenced to 30 days of hard labor.

They chose jail over bail in an attempt to overcrowd the jails, as part of the "jail-no bail" strategy, in which rather than taking bail, one would serve the full sentence in order to bring attention and dramatize the injustice that was taking place.

When Sherrod was released from jail he became a contributing member of SNCC and was often referred to as one of its founding fathers.

Working his way up in the SNCC organization, he was named the director and field secretary of Southwest Georgia.

Sherrod's strategy was to focus on the small town of Albany, Georgia as the hub for voter registration activity for the surrounding farm country.

Rather than returning to school in the fall, Sherrod moved to become a full-time organizer to stimulate new black initiatives in the strongly segregated and Ku Klux Klan–dominated community of Albany, Georgia.

Sherrod was later joined by fellow SNCC worker Cordell Reagon in October 1961.

Sherrod was 22 and Reagon was 18.

The Albany Movement's main goal was winning the right to vote for blacks in and around Albany.

The Movement also campaigned for desegregation, particularly an end to segregated terminals at bus stations and interstate travel and repeal of the city's segregation ordinances.

The Albany Movement's main goal was winning the right to vote for blacks in and around Albany.

The Movement also campaigned for desegregation, particularly an end to segregated terminals at bus stations and interstate travel and repeal of the city's segregation ordinances.

The movement was troubled by internal dissension.

While Sherrod and Reagon emphasized direct action, including sit-ins and jail-ins, and held learning sessions on how to engage in nonviolent strategies for Albany students in anticipation of a major conflict with the police, local leaders preferred negotiation with authorities for reforms.

While some local leaders, such as C. W. King, an African-American real estate agent, and H. C. Boyd, the minister at Shiloh Baptist Church, supported the campaign, others considered forcing Sherrod and Reagon to leave town.

Sherrod, Reagon and SNCC were also at odds with the tactics employed by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

While the movement was based on the nonviolent methods Sherrod learned from King, Sherrod advocated a more democratic approach based on grassroots organizing and aimed at long-term solutions, rather than King's style of short-term campaigns, dependent on his personal charisma and featuring more top-down direction.

The movement drew on support from students from Albany colleges and high schools in the town; 32 students were later expelled from Albany State University for their protest activities.

Those students received honorary degrees 50 years later in December 2011.

SNCC also used white volunteers as a way of showing that whites were the equals, not the superiors, of Blacks.

Sherrod's direct action tactics met with determined opposition from the authorities, particularly the Albany police chief, Laurie Pritchett, who ordered mass arrests of demonstrators, but avoided the sort of overt violence that would draw national attention and support for the movement.

Pritchett also undercut the jail-no-bail tactic by dispersing arrestees throughout the jails of other communities in the area.