Charles Sherrod Wife: Who is Shirley Sherrod?

Shirley Sherrod is a former Georgia State Director of Rural Development for the United States Department of Agriculture and the wife of Charles Sherrod a civil rights activist and minister.

The couple had two adult children together. She met her future husband, minister Charles Sherrod while working for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the Civil Rights Movement.

Shirley Sherrod attended Fort Valley State College and later studied sociology at Albany State University in Georgia. She later earned a master’s degree in community development from Antioch University in Yellow Springs, Ohio.

She returned to Georgia to work with the Georgia Department of Agriculture “to assist negro farmers in keeping their land.”

Sherrod and her husband were among the civil rights and land collective activists in the United States who co-founded New Communities, a collective farm in Southwest Georgia modelled after kibbutzim in Israel, in 1969.

Charles Sherrod died of natural causes at his home in Albany on Tuesday, October 11, 2022, at 3:45 p.m.