“He was the first person in S.N.C.C. to leave school to become a full-time field secretary,” Courtland Cox, another founder of S.N.C.C., said in an interview. “He set the standard for a number of us who left school to become field workers in the civil rights movement.”
Even as other civil rights workers moved on, Mr. Sherrod stayed in Albany. He married a local woman, Shirley Miller, and built a robust voting-rights effort and, later, a sprawling cooperative farm. Aside from a two-year stretch in New York to complete a master’s degree in divinity from Union Theological Seminary, he lived in Albany the rest of his life.
“He had a firm belief in the goodness of others,” Mr. Cox said, “of his ability to change men’s minds and try to convince them of the truth of a beloved community, of a just society.”
Charles Melvin Sherrod was born on Jan. 2, 1937, in Surry, a small town in southeast Virginia. His mother, Martha Mae (Walker) Sherrod, was just 14 when she gave birth to him. His father, Raymond, left the family when Charles was an infant.
Along with his wife, he is survived by his daughter, Russia Sherrod; his son, Kenyatta; his brothers, Ricardo and Roland Sherrod and Michael Gipson; his sister, Sheilda Fobbs; and five granddaughters.
After Mr. Sherrod’s father moved away, his mother took her children to nearby Petersburg, where she worked in a tobacco factory. Charles excelled at school: He sang in the choir and served as class president his senior year.
He received a sociology degree from Virginia Union University, in Richmond, in 1958 and a master’s in divinity from the university’s theology school in 1961.
