Staying and Fighting: A Conversation with Shirley Sherrod

Editors’ Note: This article was originally written for the Spring 2025 issue of Nonprofit Quarterly Magazine, “How Women of Color in the South Are Reclaiming Space.”

Rebekah Barber: You made a very conscious decision to stay in the South, particularly after your father was murdered. How did this decision shape your life’s trajectory? 

Shirley Sherrod: Growing up, remaining in the South was definitely not something I wanted to do. I thought I would look at getting away from Jim Crow and the conditions on the farm and in the South, especially Baker County, where we had a sheriff who ruled everything and everyone.

I made the decision to stay in the South the night of my father’s death. I was trying to figure out what I could do to deal with what had happened. Initially, I couldn’t see how God could let this happen to us. I struggled with that for quite some time.

That led to the decision to stay and work. I can’t tell you that I knew right away what I would do, but I knew that I was staying to do whatever I had to do.

My grandfather…had a fifth-grade education, but owning land meant, as much as we could as Black people, the opportunity to try to live a better life.

RB: Growing up, you often saw Black people forcibly removed from their land. Talk about why your work to combat Black land loss is so meaningful and personal to you.

SS: We as Black people knew the land. We knew how to make the land profitable for others and needed to be able to do that for ourselves. We saw the need to own land.

I often say to people that, coming out of slavery, our people knew two things were important: buying land and getting an education. They did an excellent job of both, through some of the worst odds you could think of.

I’ve heard stories in my family. My grandfather had made a deal to buy land and paid for the land, before the owner said, “No, you still owe more.” If it had not been for my grandmother locating all of the receipts, that man would have gotten away with it.

Then, there were some people who were just forced off the land. I grew up in a county where there were lots of plantations. One of the biggest ones was the Ichauway Plantation, owned by Robert Woodruff, the longtime president of Coca-Cola. That land wasn’t just in one piece for him to buy. That land had previously been owned by Black people.

There’s Pine Island Plantation, where, even today, some [Black] landowners who own land adjoining that plantation are under threat all the time of losing it.

I grew up knowing what it was like to live on your own land. I didn’t appreciate the independence it gave us back then. But it took my father’s death, and my commitment to stay and work, for me to get a real appreciation for what my family had gone through, and so many other families in the South.

RB: As a Black woman in the South, especially at a time when many others weren’t afforded the opportunity to have their own land and to take up space, what does taking up space and reclaiming space mean to you?

SS: It means independence of a sort. I look back to the civil rights movement. Many landowners were the backbone of the civil rights movement because they owned their own property, even though they were never totally free, due to the conditions we had to live under. But landowners enjoyed more independence. They could educate their children.

I look at how my grandfather was able to send his children to college, to give them a better life. He had a fifth-grade education, but owning land meant, as much as we could as Black people, the opportunity to try to live a better life. We always tried to make it better for each generation.

RB: It’s been more than 55 years since you started New Communities, the first community land trust in the United States. As you look back, what was it like creating something that had never been done in the United States? How does it feel knowing that your land trust has inspired so many others? 

SS: We came up with the idea based on a need, based on what was happening to our people. I guess we were simply looking at what it would mean for our people to have their own land, to be able to plan and work in their own community.

We were not thinking that we were creating the first community land trust…We were creating a community for our people to live and work in and be free. 

I can remember how, as we were having the charrette [collaborative planning meeting] and having the opportunity to dream, some of my thoughts back then were, “Wow, we can decide what kind of educational system we want. We can decide what kind of health system we want. We can decide how we want to live and work together with each other.”

It was really empowering. I didn’t realize back then that we were breaking new ground. I would think, even in the earlier years after slavery, as our people worked together to create community for themselves, some of those same thoughts were there.

It’s interesting to look back now. It wasn’t easy for someone like me, who grew up on a farm, to even think early on that we were doing something that others would look back on in later years and say, “Wow.”

We were not thinking that we were creating the first community land trust in the country. We were thinking that we were creating a community for our people to live and work in and be free.

RB: Can you talk about the way you saw other Black women organizing and making sure to take up space for themselves and for others? 

SS: Black women have never really gotten the credit that’s due for the work that they do in the family, church, and community.

That’s the system I grew up in, where we were always looking to have men lead, even though we were doing most of the work. That was an issue. I’ve always worked in organizations that we created, where the men led, and we did the work that men got credit for.

I didn’t start really organizing with women until around 2000. Prior to that, all of my work dealing with farmers was with men, who I guess felt like they were shielding their wives from a lot of stuff.

They didn’t need [their wives] to pick cotton anymore. They didn’t need them to even plant the crops, so women were sort of left out of the farming operation. That’s why I had worked mainly with Black men, because they were the farmers.

In 2000, I had the opportunity to start organizing women because of a three-state project that I helped to start with women from Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi called the Southern Rural Black Women’s Initiative for Economic and Social Justice.

I had to prove myself over and over with [Black farmers]. I gained their confidence and respect.

I’ve had situations where wives were not even aware that they were within 30 days of losing the land and the home they were living in, because the husband kept that information from them. I’ve also had situations where I’ve helped a farmer to do well with one plot of land, before he identified another he wanted to purchase. And we just had such a row because he was unwilling to list his wife’s name on the second deed. He went so far as saying he would rather put it in his son’s name who was serving in the military. It took a lot for me to actually talk him into putting that second farm in his wife’s name.

RB: What do you think it was about your upbringing and your personal life that allowed you to walk into some of these male-dominated spaces at a time when many other Black women were not?

SS: I made a commitment, and when I make a commitment to something, I try to give it everything I have.

But the other thing is, I had to prove myself with these farmers. I couldn’t just walk right in. For example, the first cooperative that I developed was in my home county. These farmers were my father’s friends. In their eyes, I was just a little girl growing up who they knew.

I remember they wanted to have a feeder-pig project, meaning we would agree to training and get hogs from the Heifer Project [now called Heifer International]. I allowed them to determine who would get the first set of hogs.

They wanted to make their own decision about who would get the hogs first, and I allowed them to do that.

They claimed they didn’t want to attend a training because, according to them, they knew how to raise hogs. Well, I couldn’t break through that.

The hogs came. We had to travel up to West Georgia to pick them up. As my bad luck would have it, the very next day, the guy from the Heifer Project came so that I could take him around to the first three farmers who received the hogs. They received five sows and a boar.

These were number-one hogs coming out of the Midwest. At the first site, the conditions were terrible. I was embarrassed, because I thought they knew better than that. At the second site, the conditions were even more terrible. The last farmer had bragged about raising his hogs on concrete, so I’m assuming this is the best site.

When the Heifer Project rep and I get to the next site, the farmer is proudly showing where he’s storing the six hogs. They were in a pasture where there was a lot of broken glass. There was a big puddle of water that he said was coming from his kitchen sink.

The farmer was proud of his setup, so he asked the rep if he wanted to see his other hogs. Of course, he said yes.

The farmer is trying to call the hogs, and they are not moving. He puts some feed down, and they’re not moving. He went and he kicked them, and they got up moving.

That was one issue. Then, he said I have hogs on concrete, and he wanted to show us that. When we looked in that pen where the concrete was, it was broken. It’s a wonder the hogs weren’t cutting themselves on the edges of the cement. The water he had falling on them was going out and other hogs were wallowing in it.

The guy from the Heifer Project said to me, “There are some serious problems here.” I said, “Let me tell you what they are,” because I didn’t want him to think that I didn’t know.

I told him to give me the chance to do some training for the farmers. I called the extension at the University of Georgia. The guy wouldn’t even talk to me. He tried to refer me to Fort Valley State, which only had a total of six agents.

So, I knew I had to do this training myself. Once I started training them, the farmers said, “You know how to raise hogs, don’t you?”

I didn’t ever have another problem with them, because I demonstrated to them that it wasn’t just talk with me. I knew what I was talking about.

That transferred into doing their business plans. There were farmers who wouldn’t even purchase a tractor without coming to sit down with me before doing so.

There was one farmer in particular who was harvesting his peanut crop. The yield wasn’t what he was expecting. His wife called me and said, “He needs to come in and talk to you now.”

He drove here to Albany (GA) to sit down with me, because he was making the decision to give up farming. Now, his situation wasn’t as bad as some others, and I tried to talk him into giving it one more year. But he said no—he just needed to end it there.

I said to him, “Would you do me one favor? Would you agree to sell your land to another Black farmer?” He did, but he didn’t have full control. The bank made a lot of decisions, but one Black farmer got a small portion of it.

The point is I had to prove myself over and over with these men. I gained their confidence and respect. I would even go into those local offices, where I realized they couldn’t speak for themselves. But I could speak for them. I could go in, be the rough person, and allow them to sit there and let me work it out for them.

RB: I think many people across the country are feeling defeated and want to look for lessons from history. Can you share an example of a time when you were able to organize amid seemingly impossible circumstances, and perhaps had to go against difficult political leaders?

SS: I’m sure there are probably many of them!

When you are faced with what we are being faced with, you can’t give up and think it’s all over. Those small fights lead to bigger fights—that’s what you have to do.

We were losing so much land as Black people. They kept sounding the alarm about Black land loss, and there was a prediction that by the year 2000 there would be no Black-owned farmland.

Based on the things that were happening to Black people at the time, one might have thought that prediction was true, but we didn’t give up.

We made the decision that we were going to fight for a Black farmers’ rights bill. So, we started a caravan in Louisiana and stopped at each state capital all the way to DC.

The last one was in Richmond, VA, where my farmers joined them because it was during the month of September and peanut harvest, so they couldn’t do the whole tour, but they joined everyone in Richmond.

The next day, in Washington, DC, we spread out to go to our different representatives and senators.

I can remember one member of Congress from Georgia. At the time, they were dealing with the Family Leave Act, so he was on the floor. He eventually came into his chambers, where we were waiting. I was trying to tell him why these farmers were there. He cut me off and said, “You don’t have to tell me what the issues are. I know them. You are here to take this picture, right?”

I was so furious. The farmers didn’t know. They took the picture with him, and he left. He didn’t win again. He lost his election that year. Wyche Fowler was his name.

Before his defeat, Fowler introduced a bill in the Senate. Mike Espy, who was the congressman from Mississippi who later became the Secretary of Agriculture, introduced it in the House. But they told us that they could not introduce a bill just for Black farmers.

They made us change it from the Black Farmers Rights Act to the Minority Farmers Rights Act. It passed. For two or three years, we would fight to get an authorization and an appropriation, which would be from $1 to $3 million. It really helped the land grant institutions and community-based organizations work more closely with Black farmers on Black land loss.

Now, if you look at that bill, it’s called the 2501 Program. Initially, the 1862 land-grant institutions—the White land grants—and other groups couldn’t get that money.

But now the authorization is up to $75 million over a three-year period. They brought in White women, then they brought in veterans. Everybody but the groups who the funds were originally intended for gets the money.

Still, we didn’t stop fighting. We kept going. These efforts led to the Pigford case [a 1999 class action lawsuit against the USDA for racial discrimination]. It led to the discrimination money being issued.

RB: It’s definitely a long struggle. To that point, as someone who as a young person made the decision to stay in the South to work to create a better world, what is your message to similarly motivated young people today? 

SS: I can tell you when I made the decision to stay and work, as I said earlier, I had no idea what that work would be. I had no appreciation early on of what we have here in the South.

I can say that there’s so much work to be done. If young people decide to stay or decide to come into this area to work, you can find a place for yourself. You can help so many people who just don’t have a clue about what they can do.

There are so many issues. For example, we ended up with a lot of Black people being elected to public office. Yet many don’t have a clue about the strength that they have or the things they can do that would really make a difference, so they just get in and they do what White people have done through the years and don’t make a real contribution where there are opportunities for that.

To that end, I’ve always wanted to start a school. I know they have one at the University of Georgia for elected officials. However, we need one for Black elected officials, so they can understand, for example, that if they are on the school board, they employ that superintendent—the superintendent is not employing them.