Sherrod, Shirley (Miller)

Impact on the world

Co-founded New Communities, Inc. in 1969 with her husband Charles Sherrod and fellow civil rights organizers, establishing the first formal community land trust in the United States on roughly 6,000 acres in Lee County, Georgia, modeled on the Israeli moshav system and intended to give Black farming families a collective alternative to the discriminatory USDA lending practices that had already cost so many Black-owned farms their land; after a prolonged drought and a USDA refusal to extend an emergency irrigation loan eventually forced the cooperative to fold, Sherrod and her husband became named plaintiffs in Pigford v. Glickman, already profiled in this collection, with New Communities ultimately receiving a $12 million settlement award, the single largest payout in the case. In 2009 she was appointed Georgia State Director of Rural Development for the USDA, but resigned under pressure in July 2010 after conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart posted a selectively edited video clip of a March 2010 NAACP speech that appeared to show her admitting to racial bias against a white farmer; officials demanded her resignation within hours, before the full, unedited 43-minute video was released the following day, revealing the excerpt had omitted the story's actual point, that her own experience helping that farmer had taught her the deeper issue was less about race than about which families had resources and which did not. The NAACP, the White House, and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack all subsequently apologized publicly for the rushed decision, and Sherrod later settled a defamation lawsuit she filed against Breitbart's estate in 2015 under confidential terms following his 2012 death.

Life & background

Born Shirley Miller in Baker County, Georgia in 1947, Sherrod's life was shaped early by racial violence: her father, a Baptist church deacon, was shot and killed by a white farmer in a livestock dispute when she was 17, and an all-white grand jury declined to bring any charges against the shooter, a decision Sherrod has said convinced her to remain in the South and dedicate her life to changing the conditions that had allowed it to happen. She attended Fort Valley State College and studied sociology at Albany State University while becoming active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the civil rights movement, meeting her future husband, minister and SNCC co-founder Charles Sherrod, before earning a master's degree in community development from Antioch University in Ohio; she returned to Georgia specifically, in her own words, to help Black farmers keep their land. While working for the Federation of Southern Cooperatives, already profiled in this collection through Ralph Paige's entry, in 1985 she assisted a white farmer named Roger Spooner facing foreclosure, an encounter she later described publicly as having reshaped her understanding of rural hardship as fundamentally about economic disadvantage rather than race alone, the very anecdote later selectively excerpted and stripped of context in the 2010 controversy. After her forced resignation, she declined the USDA's offer of a different position, calling the gesture a backhanded apology, and continued her advocacy work through the Southwest Georgia Project, using New Communities' settlement proceeds to purchase a 1,638-acre former plantation called Cypress Pond in 2011, once owned by Georgia's wealthiest slaveholder, repurposing the property to support Black farmers and rural development; she has continued that work for over a decade since, including voter registration efforts and pandemic-era food security initiatives in rural Georgia.

Sources

1. Firing of Shirley Sherrod); The 19th News; Who2.com; The Westside Gazette