Charles Sherrod

Sherrod and his wife had two children. Sherrod died on October 11, 2022.

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.

He later served as an elected member of the Albany City Council from 1976 to 1990. In later years Charles Sherrod was served as a chaplain at the Georgia State Prison in Homerville, and as a teacher at Albany State University.

Sherrod received his master's degree in sacred theology from the Union Theological Seminary. He then returned home to direct the Southwest Georgia Project for Community Education with Shirley Sherrod. In 1969, Sherrod, his wife Shirley, and other members of the Albany Movement helped pioneer the land trust movement in the U.S., co-founding New Communities, a collective farm in Southwest Georgia modeled on kibbutzim in Israel.

A supporter of racial integration, Sherrod recruited white as well as Black members to assist with voter registration efforts. Sherrod left SNCC at the end of 1966 because the head of SNCC, Stokely Carmichael, planned to exclude whites from the organization. Sherrod did not agree with this policy and decided to devote his efforts to the Southwest Georgia Project (SWGAP) instead.

The Selma Voting Rights Movement was a campaign to get voting rights for African Americans in Selma, Alabama and beyond in March 1965. Sherrod participated in the Selma Voting Rights Movement, along with other activists such as Dr. King and John Lewis.

The percentage of African Americans in Selma who were able to vote was extremely low, about 2%. When Sheriff Jim Clark barred Blacks' efforts to register to vote the movement decided on a march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, the state capital, to publicize their cause. That first march on March 7, 1965, was ended by a violent attack on the marchers by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge that became known as Bloody Sunday. A second march began two days later, but also ended at the bridge.

While the Albany Movement achieved some successes, forcing the City of Albany to repeal all segregation ordinances in 1963, it was judged at the time to be a failure. Later assessments of the movement have been more positive, regarding it as a valuable lesson in tactics that contributed to the civil rights movement's victories in subsequent campaigns.

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.

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.

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.

Sherrod also faced the constant threat of violence from whites, often on a daily basis. As Sherrod noted upon SNCC's 50th anniversary "So we had to continually, day by day, deal with fear".

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.