Charles Sherrod resigned from SNCC in 1967 but he spent the rest of his life working for change in Southwest Georgia. He married Baker County-native Shirley Miller, and the two of them, along with others in the Movement, turned their attention to economic development work. In 1969, they started New Communities, a Black-owned farm cooperative in Lee County. They envisioned agriculture as an economic base, a way to build the economic independence that went hand-in-hand with political organizing. That grew into the Southwest Georgia Movement. As Shirley Sherrod explained, for her, the Movement “never ended.”
The organizing skills she’d first learned during the Movement in the late 1960s are the same ones that Shirley Sherrod uses today.
“As Women, We Multitask and Figure Out How to Do It”
“You Have To Keep Working at It”
“The Nitty Gritty of Actually Building Something”
While Charles and Shirley Sherrod focused their efforts on economic development, Annette Jones invested herself in early childhood education, attempting to create change with the youngest of children. “We taught love and that people had to work together,” she explained. The four and five-year-olds in her programs learned self-respect and Black history, how to work together and share.
We aren’t the experts at organizing. We’ve just been at it a long time. – Shirley Sherrod