Shirley Sherrod interview recording, 1994 June 30
-
Download
- Rights
- Files (4)
-
MP3
Part 1
-
MP3
Part 2
-
MP3
Part 3
-
MP3
Part 4
- Please be patient with media downloads. They are often large files.
- Share
Loading the media player...
Transcript
- Download transcript as:
-
Text
-
PDF
-
WebVTT (includes timecodes)
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
| Charles Houston | We can get started. | 0:01 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Okay. | 0:03 |
| Charles Houston | Would you state your name, please, your birthdate, and where you were born? | 0:03 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Shirley Sherrod. Born November 20th, 1947 in Baker County, Georgia. | 0:10 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. That'll make you one of our younger respondents. | 0:19 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Oh, is that right? | 0:28 |
| Charles Houston | Yeah. The major part of the study is focusing on the period up to 1960 and, of course, with the added focus of the beginning of the Albany Movement. So I suppose I'd like to start with that first focus, that is your recollection of your early childhood in Baker County, perhaps your family background, where your parents came from, whether when you were growing up there was family around and if they were from that area, from the Baker County area, who comprised the extended family, what your father did, if they lived in the countryside, whether you were landowners, that sort of thing. | 0:28 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Okay. Both my parents were born in Baker County, in fact, not far from where I grew up. We lived in an area called Hawkinstown, and Hawkinstown is a Black-owned community, and they're all my family. My grandmother's parents and great-grandparents bought land there back in the 1890s. As I was growing up, I would hear her talk about her family up North, and I assumed up North was New York or at least north of Washington. But as I researched my family roots, I found that up North was North Georgia. When I made that discovery, I was talking to someone at church one Sunday, and he said he was from Jefferson, Georgia, and I said I was looking for the Hawkins family, and he told me there are a lot of them in Jefferson and they big landowners and they call where they live Hawkinstown. So I'm sure that that's how Hawkinstown, where I grew up, got its name. | 1:12 |
| Charles Houston | So there are two Hawkinstowns. I mean, there's one in North Georgia and one in Baker County. | 2:39 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. I haven't actually been to the one in North Georgia yet and haven't made contact with the part of the family from there yet, but that's how I learned of the two Hawkinstowns. | 2:43 |
| Charles Houston | And this is on your mother's side? | 2:56 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | My father's. | 2:58 |
| Charles Houston | On your father's side of the family. | 2:59 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yes. | 3:01 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 3:01 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yes. | 3:01 |
| Charles Houston | Do you know what county the other other Hawkinstown is in? | 3:03 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | I'll have to look it up for you, but it's Jefferson, Georgia, and I've forgotten the county seat, I mean, the county. | 3:10 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. And your father came to this area from there? | 3:19 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | No, my father was actually born here. My grandmother's father, so that would make it my great-grandfather, whose name was Rance Hawkins, came from Jefferson, Georgia. I really don't know at this point how they arrived in Baker County, but they were born pre-slavery, I mean, during slavery years, before the end of slavery. So I don't really know. My great-grandfather was born somewhere around early 1860, and then, of course, his father was with him. He also settled here at Baker County. So he was born much earlier than that, and my understanding is he lived to be about 102. His name was Wiley Hawkins. | 3:21 |
| Charles Houston | This was your grandfather's— | 4:24 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | So this would be my great-great— | 4:27 |
| Charles Houston | Your grandmother's father's father. | 4:28 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. Mm-hmm. | 4:29 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. Your great-great-grandfather was named— | 4:31 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. Wiley. | 4:32 |
| Charles Houston | Wiley. | 4:34 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yeah. Hawkins. I would hear my grandmother talk about him. She said he was part Indian. | 4:35 |
| Charles Houston | What about your mom's side of the family? | 4:47 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Okay. On my mom's side, she and my father grew up only about maybe five miles from each other, five or six miles at the most, and they went to the same school. I'm not sure of where her father's parents nor her mother's parents came from, though I do know that on her mother's side, I traced her, let's see, her mother's grandfather back to 1815 from South Carolina. I'm assuming maybe he came over from Africa at that point. I don't know at this time. But, anyway, I don't know how they ended up in Baker County at this point. But my mother's parents, I'm not sure where they came from. Her side leads directly into White people. Her grandfather was White and lived in the county. That's on her father's side. | 4:52 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. And you haven't traced that? | 6:07 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | You mean the White side? | 6:14 |
| Charles Houston | Yeah. | 6:15 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Well, I know who they are. In fact, my understanding is they were these Halls— Well, they're still there, some of them. Gosh, I can't remember the man's name. But, anyway, there were these Hall brothers who were White, who fathered two children by two different Black women, and one of those children was my grandfather, whose name was Joe Nathan Hall. His mother was Margaret Anderson, and my understanding is that she worked in the home of this Hall. I can't think of his name. | 6:16 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Anyway, these two brothers accepted their two children as their children. In the case of my grandfather, my understanding, from what I've been told— We had to wait until I started doing all this research before the family would tell us. We would have someone on my side Hall and someone on the other side trying to date, and folk would say, "You can't do it," but they wouldn't explain to us why. It was only after I started doing the family research that I found out why. It was because these were offsprings from two brothers who were White. But according to what I've been told, the father of my grandfather wife was kind of mean and didn't like what had happened. So the things that they did together, he had to do it without her blessing. | 7:01 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. The father of your grandfather's wife? | 8:04 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. Who was White. | 8:07 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. Yeah, my mind just went into a knot here. | 8:16 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yeah. And I was going to say on the other side, well, that Hall family, that lady accepted the child, and they in fact willed him quite a bit of land. I think it's about 1300 or so acres of land, and that's still intact there on my father's side. On my mother's side, his father had to help him to get his land while he was living. | 8:16 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. On your mother's side, her father— | 8:43 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Her grandfather, who is White— | 8:47 |
| Charles Houston | Grandfather, okay. | 8:48 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | — assisted her father in acquiring his land while he was still living because he knew he couldn't will him anything. | 8:49 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. Was that the 13 acres? | 8:56 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Oh, no. | 8:58 |
| Charles Houston | That was the other one. | 8:58 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yeah, that's the other one. I don't know how much land my grandfather had. I think it was more like— Let's see. He had about five children, and I think he took one of them— I think his was more like maybe about 120 acres or so. | 9:00 |
| Charles Houston | Your mother's father could only— | 9:19 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. Mm-hmm. | 9:20 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. With the help of his dad, his White dad? | 9:22 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. Right. | 9:25 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 9:26 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | And she said during her early years, she's the youngest in her family, she can remember visiting back and forth her— Well, not— Anyway, she can remember her uncle, her White uncle, visiting and her White grandfather and having them be like family, so to speak. She also said that one of the White uncles would come to try to pick her and her sisters up from school so they wouldn't have to walk. I can remember her saying they would hide because they didn't want that to happen. But when I've gotten her to talk about it, she'll say in her early years she really didn't know the difference between White and Black. | 9:30 |
| Charles Houston | All right. So she grew up with White kids as well? | 10:20 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | I don't think so. I've never heard her talk about other White children. I've heard her talk about some White people babysitting her, so I don't know whether they had children or not, when her parents would be working out in the fields and everything. | 10:24 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. So is this the land then that you grew up on? | 10:44 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | I grew up on my father's, and I grew up in Hawkinstown with my father's family. | 10:53 |
| Charles Houston | Oh, okay. Okay. So it's on that 120 acres? | 10:58 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | No. | 11:05 |
| Charles Houston | Oh. No, that was your mother's father's family. | 11:06 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | That's my mother's, right. | 11:08 |
| Charles Houston | It was one of the Hall— | 11:09 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | It's confusing, isn't it? | 11:14 |
| Charles Houston | That's okay. I'm having some difficulty, but it's just because it's new to me, I think. | 11:16 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | I'm just going to close this here. | 11:18 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 11:21 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Good morning, Robert. James. Oh, I thought that was Robert. Okay. | 11:22 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. So you grew up on your father's land? | 11:36 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Mm-hmm. You see they're in Hawkinstown there. My grandmother had about 12 or 13 sisters and brothers, and so what you'll find in Hawkinstown now, and that land is still intact, will be the offsprings from her sisters and brothers as well as land that she and her husband acquired. Her father gave her 26 acres of land when she married. | 11:38 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. Which grandmother is this now? | 12:19 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | My father's. | 12:19 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. Okay. So she started with 26 acres. | 12:24 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | 26 acres. | 12:27 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. Okay. From her dad? | 12:31 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | In Hawkinstown, right. | 12:33 |
| Charles Houston | Right. Right. Who got his land with the help of his father? | 12:34 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. No, no. That's not the one. Hawkinstown is my father's side. Hall is my mother's side. | 12:37 |
| Charles Houston | Oh, okay. I had written it down Hall, but it's Hog, H-O-G. | 12:47 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | See Hawkinstown is, that's my father, and the H-A-L-L, Hall, is my mother's side, the White folk part. | 12:51 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. But you just mentioned Hawk? | 13:01 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Hawkins. | 13:03 |
| Charles Houston | Hawkins, okay. | 13:03 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Hawkinstown. | 13:03 |
| Charles Houston | All right. I hope to salvage something of my— | 13:04 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | I'm sorry. I guess it's— | 13:09 |
| Charles Houston | No, no, no. It's not your fault at all. When your mother got married, she was given or acquired 26— | 13:17 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | No, this is my father's mother. | 13:21 |
| Charles Houston | Sorry. Yes, I've got | 13:23 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Okay. Yeah. This is still back in Hawkinstown. She was married around 1904, I believe. | 13:25 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. Okay. So your paternal grandmother started the 26 acres of land in Hawkinstown, which she acquired in— Oh, she married around 19— | 13:32 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | 1904. | 13:59 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 14:00 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | At that time, they were just the Hawkins. Well, see, now, because we've married, you have different names in there, but we're all Hawkins. But at that time, there were just Hawkins, and she talked about how her husband's mother didn't want him moving over there among the Hawkins, but her father gave her 26 acres, and then they built a house there. Now, they later acquired other land, enough so that my grandfather, when he died, my father's father, willed each of his children land. The oldest and the youngest got 62 acres, my father was the youngest, and all of those in between got 31 acres each. They had 14 children, but 12 lived to be grown. | 14:05 |
| Charles Houston | Wow. So— | 15:03 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Let's see. Three of my other uncles and aunts also acquired other land that was adjoining the family land. Then you still have all of those Hawkins there who inherited land from my grandmother's brothers and sisters. | 15:05 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. I think I've got the basic idea. The source of most of the land in Hawkinstown was land acquired by your father's father? | 15:27 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | No, my grandmother's father. | 15:42 |
| Charles Houston | Your grandmother's father? | 15:43 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yeah. My grandmother's father, who was Rance Hawkins. | 15:45 |
| Charles Houston | Your grandmother's father? | 15:54 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Mm-hmm. | 15:56 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 15:56 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | And then my father's father bought additional land. See, they got their first start with the 26 acres that my grandmother inherited from her father or was given by her father. | 16:02 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. Rance Hawkins married her, and then they— | 16:14 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | No, no. Rance Hawkins is her father. | 16:18 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 16:21 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Okay. My grandmother was Lester Hawkins, and she married Julius Miller. | 16:23 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. Yeah, maybe this is how we should do it. And her name was Laster, L-A-S-T-E-R? | 16:41 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | L-E-S-T-E-R. Lester Hawkins. | 16:44 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. And she was your grandmother? | 16:47 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Mm-hmm. | 16:50 |
| Charles Houston | She married Julius Miller about 1904. | 16:50 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. | 16:52 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. And they had 26 acres of land. | 16:53 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. That was given to her by her father. | 16:59 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. Which came down on her side. And then he acquired more land? | 17:03 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | More land. | 17:11 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. And this was your— | 17:14 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | My father's— | 17:15 |
| Charles Houston | — paternal grandmother? | 17:16 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. Mm-hmm. | 17:17 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. And it was they who willed each of their children, the oldest and the youngest 62 acres and then 32 acres to each of— So they were the source of most of the land in Hawkinstown. Was that the nucleus of the— | 17:23 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yeah, but see there are others, too. I don't know how much the Hawkins side, the other— But there's a lot of land that comprises Hawkinstown, and that's just one portion of it, the portion that was the Miller side that started with the Hawkins. | 17:36 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. That sounds really interesting. Now, was it incorporated as a town ever or do they just call it— It's a large area of Black-owned farms that's called Hawkinstown? | 17:59 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. | 18:11 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. But it's in a different municipality? | 18:11 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | It's just out in the county. It's never been incorporated, and we've never been able to even get them to pave a road through it because it's all Black-owned land, even today. Ichauway Plantation adjoins some of the land, and they've never wanted anything but dirt roads. Robert Woodruff, who was chairman of Coca-Cola for years owned Ichauway, which is about a 33,000-acre plantation. When he came to the country, he wanted it to be the country, so any attempts to get paved roads was something he was against. | 18:18 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. Since your family owned a whole area of the county, were they able to— I assume they farmed this land. Everyone farmed the land. Were they able to form a kind of family cooperative or— | 18:57 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | We didn't ever do that, although through my grandfather the family worked together, my grandparents, and that's my daddy's parents. There were 10 boys and four girls of the 14 children she had, and I told you 12 of them lived to be grown. | 19:22 |
| Charles Houston | 10 boys? | 19:45 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | 10 boys. Right. | 19:46 |
| Charles Houston | I guess that was good for them in terms of farming, continuing the management of the land. | 19:48 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. They worked together, and that's evident now even with some of the things that happen, even though they're not farming and only have, think how many uncles, I think three uncles and one aunt left. It's either three uncles or four uncles in the— Three uncles and two aunts who are still living. But they've always worked together, even though not formally as a cooperative. | 19:55 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. How do they work together? | 20:33 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | My father was the youngest, and I can remember in the early years, if he didn't have all of his crop in, everybody would help, or if he had grass in his crop, everyone would come and help to get it out. Then toward the later years when my grandfather was older and ill, well, basically, my father and one other uncle operated the farm, the entire farm, while they also worked whatever else they were doing. | 20:33 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. So they combined the management of the farm. One person oversaw the operation of all of the farms as if it were one large farm? | 21:18 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yeah. I guess you could say it that way. Even now, one of my uncles is in charge of the estate. So even though the land has been divided, with some of the family, it's still rented out to others together to farm. Then we have this sort of pact that if anyone wants to sell their portion of the land, then someone else in the family will buy it so that it stays in the hands of family, especially through the years. We started a family reunion back in 1976, and we've had it every year since then. One of my uncles donated four of his acres to the family for a family reunion site, so that as long as we have a family reunion, that's everybody's land. So we built a shed there, and we had talked a long time about different people locating a cabin or trail or something there. One of my uncles has finally done that this year. | 21:29 |
| Charles Houston | That's nice. At the end of a season, when the farms would be harvested and the crops sold, do you recall whether that was also done collectively? In other words, from an administrative point of view, what was— | 22:49 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | We just all worked together. The first year I remember working in the fields, and, gosh, I can't remember how old I was then because I started— My father and mother had five daughters, and so I tell people now he had to feel it was a curse to be a farmer and keep having daughters. So I can remember at a very early age when he would be trying to get his crops in. During those years, you had to have a mule, and you would use a distributor to put the fertilizer in the row and then a planter to put the seed out. I had to be so young that I couldn't— The most I could do was be to hold the planter in the row. So he would get the mule started on the row, and then he would get to the distributor, and I'd hold the planter and get to the end and stop the mule, and then he would turn me around and I could take it back to the end, so we would get the crop planted that way. | 23:14 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Now, I know that I had to be, what, maybe four or five years old because I can remember being able to drive something by the time I was five. Then when he got a tractor, I can remember all of us working together if Daddy was harvesting peanuts because I can remember the last year that we used the— You know when you'd have to stack the peanuts around a pole so that they could dry? So you'd have a field full of all of these poles with peanuts stacked up around them, and then you would pick the stack up. They would lift the stack and take it over to the peanut picker to separate the vine from the peanuts. So I remember shaking peanuts. That's what they called it. | 24:22 |
| Charles Houston | Putting it on this machinery then? | 25:10 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. You would go along and plow up the peanut, and then people would have to go along and lift them up, shake the— | 25:12 |
| Charles Houston | Dirt off and stack them around the pole. | 25:20 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | —dirt off and stack them around the pole. Then you'd have to get the pole, this whole stack over, to the peanut picker. | 25:21 |
| Charles Houston | You carried a bunch at a time and put it— | 25:30 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Well, they would lift it. I don't remember what it was lifted with because it would be heavy by then. The peanut picker would be stationary. It didn't move around. You just get it out in the field and then you'd bring everything over to it. | 25:31 |
| Charles Houston | What— I'm sorry. | 25:46 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Go on. | 25:46 |
| Charles Houston | What were the poles for? I've heard of people shaking and stacking peanuts, but I haven't heard of any— | 25:48 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | You just stack them around there so that— | 25:53 |
| Charles Houston | Keep them from blowing over or something? | 25:56 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. The way you stacked them, they would stay up on the pole. I don't remember how that was. | 25:57 |
| Charles Houston | Yeah, no. That makes sense. | 26:07 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | So you would take all of that over to the picker. I can remember the last year we did that, and everybody just came— If it was my father's time to harvest peanuts, then everybody would just come and help him, and then you'd go help the next one. You can hear my mother even today talk about how the Millers really stick together. So that's one thing she remembers about the family, they really— And I can remember, too, down in Hawkinstown at my grandfather's house, they had a big, big, big yard and there's an oak tree that my uncle left to stand and they've cleared everything away but the oak tree. Under that tree, there were benches and seats. So every Sunday after church, we all went there and would sit out under the tree, and looked like to me every evening somehow we would end up there. The family just came back there each Sunday. Now, I wouldn't know about conversations or why because during those days young folk couldn't sit around and listen to older people talk. | 26:07 |
| Charles Houston | Right. | 27:22 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | You know? | 27:23 |
| Charles Houston | Yeah, no, I know. Well, in part, you've already answered a question I wanted to ask, which is did your parents or did your family— Since it had what sounds like was a large farm, almost a cooperative farm, did they hire laborers? But it sounds like— Did they often hire in addition, too? | 27:27 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yeah. We would hire other people, and then we had other people living on the farm. There was one family, the Williams family. It was a female head of household, and she had about nine children, and they all grew up there on the farm. Then there were others who also lived in houses that were located on the farm. | 27:50 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. Now, were these laborers or tenants? Were they also farmers of their own little plots in— | 28:23 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | I don't know whether they were earlier or not, but during my years they were— | 28:32 |
| Charles Houston | Tenants. | 28:36 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yeah. | 28:37 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 28:37 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Well, now, what's the difference between laborers and tenants? | 28:42 |
| Charles Houston | Well, this may not be a technically correct definition, but I understand a laborer is someone who's paid by the day and who may actually live in a house that is provided by the landowner but he actually works for the landowner for wages versus a tenant who has some lease arrangement for the land and he works the land and then pays for the use of— | 28:46 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | No, they were laborers. They were laborers. But they were also like family, too, so it wasn't a strictly laborer relationship. They were like family. In fact, the lady I told you about who had nine children, she attends our family reunion. We've collected money to make some renovations at the family reunion site this year, and she donated just all of the rest of us. So they were more like family, although they were not related to us, and it was the same way with the others who lived on the farm. | 29:12 |
| Charles Houston | How big was your community, and I guess, really, how big was your family? How big was the family in Hawkinstown, and how much geographic area we talking? | 29:57 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | I wish I knew how much geographic area. I'm not good at that. Maybe when we see Sherrod, he can help me figure out how much it is. Because everything is still intact now. We haven't lost any of it during all of these years, with the first being bought back in the 1890s. | 30:07 |
| Charles Houston | Is that right? None of the land has been sold outside of the family since it was first acquired in the 1890s. | 30:27 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. | 30:34 |
| Charles Houston | That's exceptional, isn't it? | 30:35 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yeah. | 30:36 |
| Charles Houston | Yes. Okay. | 30:36 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yeah, we've been able to keep it. | 30:39 |
| Charles Houston | Why do you think that's true? I've heard since I've been here of other families, other Black families, who owned land who've either lost all of it or a great deal of it. Actually, in one case, out near Montezuma or Henderson or something, the family apparently no longer farms the land. But your family in— | 30:42 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Hawkinstown. | 31:05 |
| Charles Houston | — Hawkinstown has been farming the land for a century, owned it and farmed it for a century. Why is that? How has your family been able to do that, do you think? | 31:10 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Well, we were always told the value of owning land. That was a big thing for our family. In fact, each year now, we hear at the family reunion how the family first acquired some of the land. | 31:20 |
| Charles Houston | You mean, this is someone who's researched this and is going to make a presentation? | 31:36 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Well, see, this is from my uncles and all passing the story down of how— See, I've actually gone and looked at the deed transactions at the archives and so forth. But they say that my uncle— My great-grandfather and one of his brothers approached, and if I had my stuff out, I could tell you the name of the White man, about purchasing some land. So, of course, I guess the White people thought they would do this thinking that they would never be able to fully pay for it, but the family had stockpiled some cotton. I guess they had been sharecropping and had held onto stuff so that they could pay for the land right away once the arrangement was made. | 31:41 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | So that was the beginning of acquiring land. But it seems that, through from my great-grandparents on up and maybe before them, they felt that land ownership was important, and that's been passed down to all of us, especially through my grandfather, who was very high on education. He wanted all of his children to be educated. Having so many children and sons as well and trying to get them through school, we also hear the story each year of how they helped to keep Albany State College operating, although Albany State College doesn't have that in there in their history. I think Harley was his name. I had how many uncles going there at the time? Two or three. They would go to the church school out on Thankful Baptist Church, which is a church we were all a member of. | 32:33 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Some have spread. They're all over now. But that's the church we all grew up in. I don't remember exactly where they said they went next, but then they'd end up here at Georgia Normal, which was Albany State. That was the first name of the college over there. They thought they were going to have to close the school. My grandfather kept a big smokehouse with a lot of meat, and he was also growing a lot of crops. According to my uncles, they hauled food up here to help keep Albany State or Georgia Normal open. | 33:38 |
| Charles Houston | Because it was on financial hard times and not able to feed the students. When was this? | 34:26 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | I don't remember the year. | 34:32 |
| Charles Houston | But when your uncles were students there? | 34:34 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yeah. | 34:39 |
| Charles Houston | So this was— | 34:39 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | If you get to go— When are you leaving? | 34:39 |
| Charles Houston | Saturday. | 34:41 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | My family reunion starts tomorrow evening. | 34:43 |
| Charles Houston | Tomorrow's Friday. Yeah. | 34:47 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yeah. | 34:48 |
| Charles Houston | If it's okay, we can probably— | 34:51 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yeah. Then you could probably get some dates to some of this. It doesn't start till 7:00 tomorrow evening, but— | 34:53 |
| Charles Houston | Well, in part, it was luck. Your family had lots of boys to help continue operating the farm, and, of course, Blacks in the South, not just your family but probably all Blacks, particularly those who owned land, recognized that land was important. In one sense, it was because of your great-grandfather's resourcefulness in acquiring the land and, in part, the ability of your family to continue operating the land with lots of male descendants that helps keep things intact. That's a remarkable story. Something else you said earlier was of interest to me, and that is that when you were a little girl you used to help your dad fertilize and plant the rows and that he was using a mule. This must have been in the early '50s. | 35:12 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | It had to be. | 36:06 |
| Charles Houston | Did he not have a tractor, or did he do some of the work— | 36:10 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | He didn't have a tractor then, and I can remember when my grandfather acquired a tractor. My grandfather got a tractor first, and then my father could use it some. The reason I remember this so well is that I made a major mistake with the tractor. I was so young that I couldn't— When you're a farmer and you have a tractor, you got to get the truck with your supplies on it to the field. You're fertilizing seed. Then you've also got to get the tractor to the field. Excuse me. As I said, I was driving real early. My mother says about five or so. I started out just driving up and down in the yard with the car. So I could drive the tractor. Once he set the controls on the tractor and everything, then I could get it to the field and stop, and then he could turn it off and everything. So that's how we would get the truck and the tractor to the field. | 36:12 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | I wish I knew what years these were, but I know that I was very young because one day coming back from the field my father was following me on the tractor. I was on the tractor. He was driving the truck. There were a bunch of kids in the yard playing, and I just got it in my head that I was going to show them what I could do. So instead of driving along slowly like he had me driving, I pulled down on the little lever that speeds it up and I lost control of it. There was this big old tree in front of the yard, so as I lost control in trying to turn the wheel, I went up this tree a little and then it came back down and cut off. So my father got out of the truck, and he was just really getting on me. My mother came out of the house saying I was too young to be doing it anyway and to leave me alone. So I'll never forget that. | 37:16 |
| Charles Houston | Wow. When I think of really large farms and particularly, even in your family's case, where there's smaller farms that are administered or operated to some extent as if it was a large farm, it seems that economy of scale would say, "Gee, a tractor would be good," or, "We should automate," and that would've happened sooner. Was there a reason why your family didn't? | 38:09 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | I don't know whether it was that they couldn't afford to by then. I really don't know. See, you'd have to understand something, too, about Baker County. It's a strange place to have to grow up. If you ever read Parting the Waters, you'll read about two sheriffs from Baker County. So my parents grew up during the years of Screws, who was the sheriff. Claude Screws was his name. Then, of course, I grew up during the years of the Gator. His name was Warren Johnson, but everybody called him the Gator. | 38:44 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | I'm sure if Baker County was as bad as it was during my years for Black people, it had to be worse during my parents' years. Baker County was a county. If you go through there now, you'll see that there are no railroad tracks, a lot of plantations. I think everybody had the notion of keeping Baker County like it was. I mean White people. So it was a difficult place for Black people, probably no more difficult than anywhere else here in the area because you have a lot of other places like it. But Baker County was notorious for a lot of things that happened there. | 39:32 |
| Charles Houston | So, in a sense then, being progressive or modern might have been problematic in Baker County. | 40:22 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | I'm sure. It's interesting. I hear my uncles talk about how my grandfather would go to Tuskegee. See, he was real high on education, real high on education. So that's why he would be interested in keeping Albany State or Georgia Normal open. I'm assuming during all of those years back there whoever was in charge of at Tuskegee at the time, they would go to meetings over there. In fact, one of my aunts went to school there at Tuskegee. | 40:31 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. And this is your grandfather? | 41:16 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | My father's father. Julius Miller. | 41:20 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 41:23 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | So they did get out and— | 41:27 |
| Charles Houston | Used new agricultural, the latest in agricultural technology and science. You said your grandmother went to Tuskegee? | 41:31 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | No, no. One of her children went to— | 41:39 |
| Charles Houston | One of your uncles? | 41:41 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | One of my aunts. | 41:44 |
| Charles Houston | One of your aunts went to— | 41:45 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yeah. My only aunt that went to college, her name is Kara Layson now, it was Kara Miller, went to Tuskegee, and the boys went to Georgia Normal or Savannah State. | 41:45 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. Well, I'm thinking two things. One, although your father did not get a tractor until relatively late, you're suggesting that your family certainly stayed abreast of the latest agricultural technology and ag science through as far back, certainly, as your grandfather, as his interest in Tuskegee and Albany State or Georgia Normal and Savannah State. But on the other hand, some farms were mechanizing as early as the 1930s, as the late '30s and into the '40s. But to have done that in a very backward county would've made your family conspicuous. | 42:13 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | I'm certain. I don't know what led to the first tractor, but I can remember it was a little Ford tractor. Today, I would call it a 2000 Ford. That's a really small Ford. | 43:20 |
| Charles Houston | Where does your family sell its produce, the farm harvest? | 43:41 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | It was sold in Camilla. We would take the cotton to a cotton gin in Camilla. The peanuts would go mostly over to a place— It was Hopeful, was the name of the little town. That's also in Mitchell County. Camilla's in Mitchell County. See, there wasn't much in Baker County. There's not much there now either. I think it was purposeful on the part of the White people to just try to— Dougherty County was carved out of Baker County. So I would think the more progressive people were in Dougherty, and then people who didn't want to see change and so— | 43:46 |
| Charles Houston | Stayed in Baker? | 44:36 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Mm-hmm. | 44:36 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. Generally, too, it's my understanding that owning land made Blacks more independent, that kids could stay in school, that you just had more security. Based on your perception of the plight of non-land-owning Blacks, did it seem that your family enjoyed a greater security and independence, and could you talk a little bit about that? | 44:45 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | I always felt that, although during the years, during spring, you could tell the landowners' children who were children of landowners versus those who lived on the plantations because cucumber picking time would always take place in the spring and our parents would come and pick us up from school at lunchtime to pick cucumbers, wherein the children who were living on Ichauway Plantation and some of the other plantations didn't do that because their parents were the ones who were actually working on the farms on the land. Because, see, most of those plantations like the one, Pineland Plantation and Ichauway Plantation, those owners were basically interested in hunting. They would operate a farm, but I don't know that they had cotton, a crop that was labor-intensive like that, but corn and peanuts, other crops they did have. I don't know about pre-1950 or so. I don't know how they operated them then. | 45:12 |
| Charles Houston | But your perception is that in the springtime the children of landowners had to work and the children of non-landowners didn't? | 46:23 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. | 46:30 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. But from what I've been told, at other times of the year, not necessarily in the spring but certainly in the fall, the difference between the children of landowners and non-landowners was that the children of landowners could stay in school while the children of non-landowners living on the White man's land had to pull their kids out and make them work in the field— | 46:31 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | That probably happened in earlier years, and maybe as you talk to some of my— If you go down to the reunion tomorrow night and talk to some of my relatives, they could probably speak to that in earlier years. I don't know whether because the plantations had changed crops or whatever to the point where they didn't need the younger people to pick cotton or move the stubble, or maybe they had gotten tractors long before we had, and therefore things had changed for them and that's why it wasn't evident during my early years. | 0:00 |
| Charles Houston | That there was such a big difference between the children of landowners and the children of non-landowners? | 0:38 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right, but I always felt that— I don't know why, I just always felt that we were better off in that we were landowners, and I think it's because my grandparents and my parents led us to believe that. | 0:43 |
| Charles Houston | Sure. Well, another reason I would think you might be better off, and maybe you could speak to this, I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to speculate, but why not? Is that when it came to settlement time that non-landowners, especially those who were tenants, were sharecropping. Had to take whatever the White man gave them, which frequently was nothing. I mean, frequently, he would say, "Oh well you owe me." And so they were kept in perpetual debt and poverty, where I assume, that landowners would've had a bit more leverage and maybe perhaps some choice about where they sold their crops, and being able to deal with a buyer who was more fair-minded. | 1:01 |
| Charles Houston | Did you get the impression that your family chose the merchants to whom they sold their crops when they harvested? Or was that more of a customary relationship? And if it was, was that customary relationship satisfactory for your family as far as you know? | 1:49 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | I think for the most part, they chose who they wanted to buy from and who they wanted to sell to. | 2:10 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 2:19 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | And knowing what I know of my grandfather, he would not have had it any other way because he believed in being a strong individual. | 2:20 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. You said so your family would've chosen, particularly your grandfather, whom to buy from and whom to sell to. When you bought things— I mean, most people from farming families say that their families were self-sufficient, that they had gardens and they grew what the family consumed, as well as growing a cash crop or cash crops. I assume your family did— | 2:39 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yeah. In fact, listening to my grandmother talk about the early years, they rarely had to go and buy much because they raised everything there on the farm. And I've also heard them talk about the earlier years, how they also raised rice, which was something we didn't do during my years. She didn't talk about them having to go to town to get very much. Like I said, they kept a large smokehouse, and my grandfather believed— Well, with all of those children, how could they afford to go and buy from anywhere? And my grandmother, she was a very good cook and she talked about coming out of the field and having one of her children. So she worked very hard. | 3:07 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | She also doctored on everybody around there. In fact, they would call her— There were some White people who lived somewhere near, and they would call for her. And there was a doctor in the later years, the doctor in Camilla, I can't even think of his name, would have her around, but she wasn't officially a midwife, but she really was. She'd be there for everybody. They would call her to come in and help. | 4:03 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | And I can remember there was one of the offsprings from the family I told you that lived on the farm, the Williams lady, one of her children had a large naval. And I saw my grandmother do something one day and she didn't ever tell us what it was about. And I want to ask him now how is his naval? Because she said, "You use a Guinea egg," and she would do something, and whatever she did— Because I sat there watching her and she'd do something so many times, and whatever, and whatever. And then she took it around back of the house and buried it. And she said as it deteriorated, the naval would go in. She told us only she had to— She couldn't tell what she did. It was something that was passed down, and she didn't pass down whatever it was to us. | 4:39 |
| Charles Houston | Oh, she didn't? | 5:36 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | No, no. | 5:36 |
| Charles Houston | Oh, that's too bad. That's too bad. It's interesting that she did it. Was she the family practitioner of folk medicine? I mean, was she— | 5:44 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yeah. | 5:48 |
| Charles Houston | And so other people in the family would call on her when they had problems. | 5:48 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Mm-hmm. Can I— Excuse me just a moment. | 5:50 |
| Charles Houston | Yeah sure. Just let the [indistinct 00:06:02]. | 5:50 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Okay. | 5:50 |
| Charles Houston | Yeah. | 5:50 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | And so I really regret that I wasn't more interested in what she had to say. | 6:03 |
| Charles Houston | You think she would've passed it on to you if you'd shown some interest? | 6:09 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Probably so. But you know how young people are and old people babbling all of the time. That's why sometimes things would come back to me as I would research the family history, and that's why this up North thing, because she constantly talked about her family up North. And she would also talk from time to time about what she did, but she wouldn't give you her little secrets. It was like, well, this was a special little whatever. I don't know where she got it from. And she would talk about her parents a lot, but every now and then, some of that stuff comes back. | 6:14 |
| Charles Houston | So when you think about her talking to you about these things, we're now talking about the late fifties? | 6:58 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yeah. Well— Yes. '50. Yeah. | 7:07 |
| Charles Houston | '50. I'm thinking perhaps '55? You would've been eight years old or so in 1955. So '55 to '60 in there somewhere at ages eight to 12 or 13. | 7:14 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yeah. | 7:24 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. Where did you go to school? | 7:33 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | I went to school in Baker County. Of course, a segregated school. And I can't remember the year I started, but I remember the year I went to the fifth grade. | 7:35 |
| Charles Houston | What year was that? | 7:53 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | But anyway, that was '57. Yeah, I was in the fifth grade. It was '57. So I would've gone on to the sixth grade at the beginning of the fall term. But we had this wooden school with the open hallway, so no top over the hallway, just a wooden hallway, no top on it and buildings on the side of that. | 7:53 |
| Charles Houston | Okay, so it's the two facing buildings with a— | 8:19 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | With a walkway. | 8:21 |
| Charles Houston | Something in it. Yeah. | 8:22 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. Right. So after Brown versus Board of Education, they decided that separate but equal. They decided we would get a school. So I started in that school and I can remember in the first grade, so I had to be six. Well, five was when I started. So around '52, I think. '52 or '53, somewhere in there. | 8:23 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. And it was a wooden school where you started? | 8:57 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. Right. And then I went to— See in that school, I can remember having to take wood to school on the days you had to take the lighter, the little fat to start— | 8:58 |
| Charles Houston | To start the stove? | 9:06 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. So I would have to take that. We'd have turns. We'd have to take turns taking that. And then in the second grade, I didn't get to go to school in that building. The second grade was held away from the campus in a building that was a juke during the daytime, and it had two rooms, and there were two sisters who taught the second grade. So they had two classes down. The one would be in one room and one in the other, teaching the second grade. Then in the third grade, I got a chance to go back up to the main building. Now we didn't have a place for assembly. So there's a church first— I mean, Pleasant Grove Baptist Church, which wasn't far from the campus where we would have assembly in the church. So we'd have to go down there, walk to the church for the assembly, anytime we had to come together for a program. | 9:07 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 10:05 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | And then in the fourth grade, by the time I was in the fourth grade, they had started building the new school and therefore we had to split up and go to different churches. Some were able to stay at the building that we had and some of us had to go to churches. So I went to the fourth grade in a church. It was a Methodist church. I can't think of the name of it now. It's still there. But the fourth grade, I was in the church in part, and I can't remember where I was up to the time we moved into the school, but I think it was March of '67. That March or April of '67— I mean '57. That we moved into the new school. | 10:05 |
| Charles Houston | The new school in fifth grade? | 10:57 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. My uncle, we buried my uncle on the day they moved into the school. So I couldn't select my desk. I had to get what was left because I didn't get to go to school. | 10:58 |
| Charles Houston | So the Methodist church was in Newton? | 11:12 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. | 11:15 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 11:15 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yeah. I can't— I should know the name of that church real well, but I can't think of it right now. But it's Methodist. | 11:18 |
| Charles Houston | Could you describe the— I mean, you've described the outside of the wooden school where you started school in '52. Well, you said there were two wooden buildings facing each other and connected by a wooden walkway. Were those two buildings, single room buildings, one room buildings each? I mean was it just one room in each of those? | 11:27 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Rows of rooms. | 11:46 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. And were the grades separated in those rooms? I mean— | 11:47 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | We were all at the— I always went to a school where you had grades one through 12. | 11:53 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 11:57 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | So the schools weren't— Even after we got the new school, one hallway was the elementary and the other one was the high school. So we've all always had the grades to— together. | 11:59 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. And what about teachers? Did you have teachers for each? A separate teacher for each grade? | 12:14 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yeah. | 12:19 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 12:19 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Now it was different during the mother's time when they were going to school at the church. But we had separate teachers by then. | 12:25 |
| Charles Houston | And I mean, aside from cucumbers, you didn't miss any time from school because of farm work? | 12:38 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | No. Because when we would go back in the fall, we'd start picking cotton in August so that by the time we were in school toward the end of August, we could come home after school and complete the picking of cotton. So it was basically the spring where we had to get out early. | 12:44 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. And then you're not aware that any of the children of non-landowners had to miss school? | 13:08 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Maybe some of them did, but I always felt they didn't. They didn't. See, like I said, there were plantations, a lot of plantations down there. And so by then, I guess whatever— The plantations weren't really in the share cropping maybe like they had been in earlier years. So Pineland Plantation, for example, that's owned by the Mellon family, operated the entire farm. So they had workers, so this would be the fathers and the mothers that would work in the big house and do other things on the farm. And there were really no jobs per se for the younger people. | 13:14 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 13:55 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Okay. | 13:55 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. What about socializing with the kids? I mean, as you were growing up, you were living on your family's farm. Were your playmates your neighbors and therefore your family, or were they kids that you met at school and did you meet them kids at school who came from other areas with— This sounds like it must have been a fairly big school. | 13:58 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yeah. I don't know how many children there were in the entire school, but for the most part your playmates, my playmates came from Hawkinstown and then I had friends at school. And then during those years you'd end up writing letters when school wasn't in. But in Hawkinstown we were all a member of the same church, which was Thankful. And so we went to church together. Our means of transportation was for the most part walking from home to home to visit. | 14:32 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Sometimes you'd get a chance to get the truck or something as we got older. Like I said, I was driving real, real early, and back then you didn't have to worry about being stopped by the police or whatever because you didn't have a license. And like I said, Baker County is a peculiar place anyway, as long as you didn't bother White folk too much, you could drive just about anywhere. The state troopers couldn't stop anybody in the county during later years, well, earlier years too, because we had sheriffs that ruled their territory. | 15:16 |
| Charles Houston | And did not recognize the jurisdiction of state troopers even on state roads. | 16:00 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | That they can tell you now the Gator, in fact, it was reported in the news. The Gator ran a state trooper out of Baker County, he was stopping his nephew and he used a shotgun. He just didn't play. Anybody who came through there with an out-of-county tag was stopped for— Unless they were able to get through without being seen. And depending on whether he was drunk or what state of mind he was in, you were lucky to just give him money to keep going. A lot of Black people were beaten and killed. The sheriff before him, Screws, lynched one of my relatives, and I don't know whether this was the '30s or '40s, and this was a relative on my mother's side. And anyway, it was a landmark case because— And maybe In Parting The Waters, you see the years because Taylor Branch talks about it in his book, an all White jury convicted the sheriff of murder. | 16:04 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | But he got it overturned at the Supreme Court level. And I think Justice Black was the one who wrote the opinion and what— They overturned it by saying, "You had to prove that when the sheriff went and got Bobby Hall from his home, he intended to deprive him of his civil rights." So the Rodney King case, all of this goes back to Screws during the civil rights movement. Bobby Kennedy kept citing Screws as the reason why they couldn't do some things. So that was a landmark case, and it was interesting that an all White jury would actually convict him, and he would get to the Supreme Court level and get it overturned. | 17:23 |
| Charles Houston | I was going to ask you what some of the signs of Jim Crow were in Baker County and I mean there couldn't be a more clear sign than this. | 18:16 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yeah, I can remember one of my uncle's, my mother's uncle, so he would've been a great uncle to me. Uncle Josh was very active and it had to be in the '50s when his house was bombed, the porch. He went to try to register the vote, he and there was three more people. Carl Broadway and can't remember who— Was it T. Kunny? I think so. They went to register to vote and his home was bombed. I was very young then. That was in the fifties. During those years too before Screws' term as sheriff ended, before he retired, if you want to call it that, Warren Johnson, who was the Gator, was a revenue agent. | 18:30 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | And I can remember being afraid of him based on what I heard Black people saying, family and so forth, how he would just kick the door in of Black folk. That's how he got that name. Because he'd do something or holler like, "Hueh." You know? And they'd— | 19:28 |
| Charles Houston | That's the Gator? | 19:49 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. So that's when he got his name during his years as a revenue agent, and then he later became sheriff. Now I've heard some of my cousins talk about Screws. They say, and I don't know whether this is an old folk tale or whether it's true, but they said he had killed a number of Black people. And during his later years he lost his eyesight, and I don't know what else was wrong with him, but they said he lived somewhere down there in Newton. And he would be saying— He'd hear someone and say, "Is that a nigger? If that's a nigger, please come in here. Please." He just wanted Black folk around him during the years when he was about to die. And they said, he told, the Gator said, "Whatever you do, don't kill a nigger." | 19:50 |
| Charles Houston | So he was looking to Black people for absolution, for his sins, for forgiveness? | 20:43 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Mm-hmm. | 20:53 |
| Charles Houston | Now you mentioned that in the '50s about the time that Screws, that Screws' reign was changing to the Johnson reign, that your mother's uncle Josh— | 20:53 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Josh Williams. | 21:12 |
| Charles Houston | — Tried to register and his house was bombed. | 21:13 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. | 21:15 |
| Charles Houston | And he of course lived in Hawkinstown. | 21:19 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | No. He lived in— | 21:21 |
| Charles Houston | In Newton? | 21:23 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | No. He lived near her family. | 21:24 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 21:25 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Okay. The halls. | 21:26 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 21:27 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Okay. He was a Williams, and her mother's mother was a Williams before marrying a Hall, before marrying Arnett, and then her mother was a Hall. | 21:28 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. Was there a greater sense of security among people in Hawkinstown say than could be enjoyed by your uncle Josh? I mean, by virtue of the fact that you lived close to each other and you lived on family owned land, I mean, did it seem more secure? | 21:48 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | I don't know because he also— That side of the family, because he owned quite a bit of land as well near my mother's father's land and all. He was very outspoken and really, really stood up for the rights of Black people. I don't think anybody in Baker County felt any more secure than anybody, any Black person, because it was Baker County. Anything could happen. | 22:06 |
| Charles Houston | Right. | 22:41 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Mm-hmm. | 22:41 |
| Charles Houston | Was there in the '50s than here, a sense that— I know you were very young, but I mean did you hear your parents talk or adults talking about the fact that it was time for things to change? What kind of talk did you hear? | 22:45 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Mm-hmm. Yeah. My father would talk to us about, as we started driving and just about all of us, we were just itching to drive. So we drive— We started driving real early. He would talk about how during his years of growing up, if a White man was driving in front of them, they couldn't go around him no matter how slow he was going. And then I can remember, I don't know what year this was, my father decided that he had been paying taxes and it was high time he registered to vote. So he and my mother and one of my aunts went to register to vote. And I'm trying to remember whether she, I think she said they were successful. I think. I'm not sure though. | 23:04 |
| Charles Houston | Was this before the '50s? | 24:08 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | No. | 24:08 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 24:08 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | This is the latter part of the '50s or somewhere— But latter part of the fifties or right at the '60s. | 24:08 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 24:16 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Okay. So we would hear talk of— Of course, with my uncle Josh really pushing to try to register to vote. And then they were with other people. There was King. C.B., C.B. King. Not C.B. His daddy, Daddy King as we call him here. | 24:19 |
| Charles Houston | Right. | 24:42 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | I can't think of his first name now. | 24:44 |
| Charles Houston | That's okay. | 24:45 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | But they would be— They'd have these burial societies, and therefore Black people would somehow through those from county to county communicate. So it appears that my folk down there had a lot of contact with people up here, even though I used to hear my mother talk about having to use the wagon. My grandmother used the wagon to come here and how long it would take and so forth. | 24:46 |
| Charles Houston | These burial societies that they communicated through actually were networks that extended across communities in different counties? | 25:21 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. | 25:28 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 25:28 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Because the King, C.B.'s daddy— Gosh, I just can't think of his name right now. | 25:34 |
| Charles Houston | Yeah. It's— | 25:42 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | He was one of those main people. I know Chevene but his name wasn't— It looked like it was something else. I can't think of. | 25:43 |
| Charles Houston | Yeah. Its okay. So there was, in the late '50s, a sense that it was time for changing. It was time to take more risks to achieve change. Was there an institutional support for your uncle Josh's activities, for his efforts to register? And in other words, was he affiliated with the NAACP? Was there an active NAACP chapter in Albany or in Baker County? | 25:51 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yeah. I really don't know, but I would think that there had to be something in light of the fact that three people chose to do it. So I don't know. | 26:34 |
| Charles Houston | Well, including your uncle Josh, your father, your mother and aunt. | 26:44 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. Right. Well see, but this was even before Uncle Josh, Carl Broadway and Benjamin Kunny was even before my parents and my aunt. So that was definitely in the '50s, I believe. | 26:48 |
| Charles Houston | Right. | 27:03 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | You know? | 27:12 |
| Charles Houston | Right. | 27:12 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | So— | 27:12 |
| Charles Houston | And did all three of them, Josh, Broadway and Kunny have trouble? I mean— | 27:12 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yeah. Well, I know they bombed Uncle Josh's house. They did something to Carl Broadway, and I don't remember whether that was when they tried to get Mr. Kunny on— He has an interesting story tell about how they tried to get him on bootleg and liquor, and the Gator just knew he had him and everything. Mr. Kunny is the only Black person in the county, whoever had the nerve to run against the Gator for sheriff. And even today he doesn't back up from anybody, and he's probably in the latter part of his seventies. So he was— They tried. | 27:13 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | So I'm assuming that effort to try to get him on bootlegging liquor charges, I mean, the charge of bootlegging liquor, they kept him in jail for some time and the Gator just knew he was sending him on off to prison when he took him over to Camilla for the hearing. And he had gotten a lawyer, a White lawyer too, out of Colquitt, Georgia, who handled it successfully. And then the Gator wouldn't even give him a ride back to Newton. But I'm sure that that's part of why they were after him. And I don't know whether they had gone to try even before that or not. But Mr. Kunny, if he got a chance to talk to him, he would be one of those people who would know. | 27:58 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 28:49 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Mm-hmm. | 28:52 |
| Charles Houston | Well, I mean things I really did start changing here in the early sixties. Again, you were still a teenager. | 28:54 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yes. | 29:01 |
| Charles Houston | Could you talk a little bit about, I mean, the incidents that led up to the beginning of the Albany Movement and the protests that ultimately expanded and became a broad frontal attack on Jim Crow? | 29:03 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Okay. During those years I didn't keep up a lot with what was happening here in Albany, although we had a TV, in fact, our family was the first family to get a TV down in Hawkinstown. So I can remember us putting the TV out on— I can't even remember the year, this was in the fifties, but I can remember we put the TV out on the porch and everybody would come and watch it. So we were able to see some of what was happening and other parts of that that was on TV. And then of course my father and all of them were able to keep up with what was going on here and I would hear them talk. | 29:20 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | I know that the movement was going on here in Albany, because we didn't shop here because they were boycotts. And then also people from the Albany Movement would come down to our church to raise money, and we would take up donations to help support what was going on here in Albany. And then as my uncles and aunts would come home and everybody would come home, I mean my grandparents home was— I mean they were just a close family, as my mother used to say about them. They'd all come home and everybody would be talking all at one time. So they'd come home for every holiday. And by then I was staying with my grandmother so I'd hear the talk that they were doing. These were my aunts and uncles who were teachers who lived in other places by now, but— | 30:11 |
| Charles Houston | Including Albany? | 31:08 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | I didn't have any who lived here in Albany. They moved far away. | 31:09 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 31:15 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | By far away, in other places in Georgia. Didn't want to have much to do if their parents weren't there, if the land wasn't there. I don't think they would ever want to come back to Baker County again during those years. Now we are slowly getting them to, like I said, one of my uncles, even though he lives in Columbus and he has land up in Harris County, he still has land in Baker County because it was willed to him. And he's now put a trailer on the family reunion site, which is a milestone because they didn't— So many bad things have happened. He used to say he didn't want ever want to live there again. So to have him put a trailer there to at least come back and stay some— | 31:15 |
| Charles Houston | Shows that some progress was happening. | 31:55 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. So we would hear things that were happening here, and I'd hear my parents talk and I'd come— My father would bring us to the dentist here in Albany, Dr. Hamilton. And I would hear them. They would go off and talk. And I knew going back over what was happening, I know that they were also talking about the movement moving into Baker County, because every time we came to the dentist, I would— I didn't know what was going on then. But when I put some of the conversations together later after my father was murdered, then I know that that was what it was about. | 32:00 |
| Charles Houston | Yeah. The impression I've gotten from talking to some people is that your father's murder actually gave great impetus to the movement. And in fact, some people out in the county see that as the beginning of the movement. | 32:44 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Mm-hmm. | 32:59 |
| Charles Houston | You could see— | 33:00 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | It was. | 33:01 |
| Charles Houston | —the community reaction. | 33:01 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | It was. The Gator had— White people had killed so many Black people in the county. And my father was a likable person. I think everybody liked him. I mean, he had five daughters, so you think that's enough children, but he did things for other children in the community. Their parents wouldn't take them to events at the school and he just load up the truck and take— He tried to do a lot of things with us. He was just a good father, not only to us but to others around the community. So he was well-liked by everyone. And I think when he was murdered it was almost like people didn't even need to think. It's just that we need to react now. We need to deal with this now, because for them to murder someone like him was just more than I think everybody was willing to take at that time. | 33:02 |
| Charles Houston | But the movement was already going on in Albany— | 34:12 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | In Albany. | 34:14 |
| Charles Houston | —at that time because your dad had been talking about it with Dr. Hamilton. | 34:15 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. See the movement had been going on in Albany since '61, and those talks were going on '63, '64 I would think. I don't remember how long. He would bring us up to the dentist and that's why I knew. And I'm sure there were other meetings that I didn't get to know about, because in talking to my husband, he said they had had several meetings down in Baker County. So there were other things that I wasn't aware of that were going on. | 34:18 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. | 34:49 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Mm-hmm. | 34:49 |
| Charles Houston | And your father's murder served as a catalyst in Baker County for demonstrations in Newton. | 34:52 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. And— | 35:02 |
| Charles Houston | And I understand that some of the SNCC people came out to Newton and helped organize the marches. | 35:05 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. | 35:12 |
| Charles Houston | Now you were part of that. Could you talk a little bit about it? | 35:13 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yes, in the early part of it, my father was murdered March 25th— Well, he died March 25th of '65. My mother was, what, seven months pregnant with what ended up being my brother. Like I told you, there were five daughters before that and my youngest sister was eight years old. So my brother was born. I mean to have all of this happen to someone so well liked, and then my mother being pregnant, and five daughters, and we didn't know how we would be able to take care of ourselves because my father had been farming before that. Had just moved into a new home. It was actually her uncle who murdered him, the White uncle, who murdered him. And then the White people refused to do anything about it in terms of indicting him and so forth. So with the talks having already gone on with some of the SNCC people, then by June of '65, Sherrod and I don't know who else came into the county. | 35:16 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | And the reason why I can't say who else, one— My aunt who lived in Atlanta, the aunt who went to Tuskegee, was a principal at a school in Atlanta at the time. I'm certain the family was concerned about the fact that their youngest brother was dead, and there was the wife and five children and one on the way, and looking at what could be done to help. So I graduated from high school on the day my brother was born, and she wanted me to attend this— And I was supposed to go to school in the fall of college. | 36:33 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | So my aunt wanted me to attend this pilot Upward Bound Program. It was a pilot program in the summer of '65 at Clark College in Atlanta. So a couple of weeks after my brother was born and I went up to Atlanta, so I wasn't actually there for the very first meeting, but I came home for the 4th of July weekend because by then everything had started and I could barely stay up there with calling home or writing home, and finding that people had actually decided to do something about my father's death. Starting the movement. | 37:12 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | See on the night he died, I remember the house being full of people and I can remember not wanting to be a part of a crowd, not wanting to deal with people. So I went into the bedroom. It was actually my sister's bedroom cause I had been staying with my grandmother. And see the house, they had just moved into the house a week before he died, before he was murdered, before he was shot. And so the dirt was still from where they dug and laid the foundation, so the dirt was still piled up there where you could see it looking out the windows. And I can remember looking out the window and thinking that as the oldest child, I should do something. But what I was thinking, "I'm not a man," and I felt a man would try to go and do something to the man who murdered daddy. | 37:56 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | So I finally arrived at an answer and my answer was that I would devote the rest of my life to working for change. So before that though, I had not told my parents that I didn't intend to live in the South anymore. I felt my answer— And when I was leaving was, I was going to go to school in the North, and I didn't intend to come back and live my life in the South at all. But I couldn't tell them that. I just wanted out of the South, out of Baker County. And I had this crazy notion that things were so much better in the North that I wouldn't experience the racism. I wouldn't experience what I had to experience when the visiting teacher, who was the superintendent's wife, came into our classroom one day and wrote words on the wall like, "government," and something else and made us pronounce them until we pronounced them exactly like she did with her White southern twang. | 39:02 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | My answer to what had happened to my father was to say that, "I would devote my life to working for change." I had no idea how I would do that or what I would do because I mean, I hadn't been active in the civil rights movement, I only knew what I had heard others talk about and had been able to observe from what was happening in the Albany Movement. So to find that SNCC had come to the county, and so I could barely stay. I wanted to leave that program, but I couldn't leave because I would've disappointed my aunt. So they agreed to let me come home for the 4th of July weekend, so I got a chance to attend my first mass meeting that weekend. And I can remember standing in the church and just crying because the church was full of people, and they had already had Bloody Saturday, I think by then. And they called it "Bloody Saturday" because when they marched and the White people beat them. | 40:12 |
| Charles Houston | Because they beat them. | 41:24 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. And then hearing my folk— I say my folk and I'm talking about not just family, but other Black people there in the county, getting up talking and acting like they weren't afraid. And I can remember thinking in the church that night, "This is the answer. This is how I'll be able to do it." So I went back and completed that six weeks of school there, and came back and just jumped wholeheartedly into the struggle. I think one of the first things I got a chance to do once I came back, a hearing was being held at the courthouse that night because the jail was full of was my relatives and other people. My sisters, I think, two or three of my sisters were in jail, and aunts, and cousins and other people who weren't related. So they were having a hearing that night at the courthouse to decide whether they would be released or not. | 41:24 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | And C.B. King, who was our attorney, everybody's attorney it seems, was down for the hearing. And the judge made the decision to let the juveniles out. The hearing was being held upstairs in the courthouse there in Newton. And so when the judge and the prisoners, so to speak, were led back out, we got up to leave and the Gator just went and shut the door and said, "Sit your goddamn asses down." And then he stayed in there cursing, and calling out names, and carrying on until he got tired. And then he got up and opened the door and said, "Get your goddamn asses out." So we all went out, and went down and got in the cars, but knowing Baker County, we knew we had to ride in groups. We couldn't just get out and go. You needed to stay together. And I think about two miles out of Newton, the sheriff's son was stopping everybody saying, "You didn't stop at the stop sign back up in Newton." So those kinds of things they were doing to harass us. | 42:35 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | I went to register to vote and the Gator was standing at the steps of the courthouse and pushed me back out. Sherrod was with me and there were three others I think who also went to register. I was up front and he pushed me back from the steps, and he also pushed Sherrod down as I remember. He was going with us. So I didn't get a chance to register to vote on my first attempt. We later had a hearing when we were getting an injunction against the sheriff where I testified to that. We had to go to Washington later that summer to testify. I think Ramsey Clark was the Attorney General, and there were some hearings on Baker County. I don't even remember who was conducting them, but we had to secretly get around the county to raise money. I think some unions were also helping us. | 43:48 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | And we were going to take five carloads of people. We identified everyone who needed to go. So I think this was August of '65 that we were leaving at the end of a mass meeting. There's a new bridge that's built across the Flint River from Baker to Mitchell County now. But back during those years, the older bridge was closer to downtown Newton, and it was narrow so that it was very difficult for two cars to pass each other on that bridge. But we knew that we were meeting that night at Thankful Baptist Church, which is the church I grew up in. And so the five card loads left the church and came up Highway 91 to Newton, but instead of going through Newton to come through Albany and continue north, we went— I guess that's west. No, no, no. Yeah. That's the way. | 45:02 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Anyway, we went west and we took a detour into Mitchell County and took the back roads north. We had somehow been able to keep this whole trip very quiet so that the Gator didn't get word that, and other Whites, of what we were doing. So the Gator heard of our trip to Washington through the news and someone said, he said, "If he had known, we never would've made it." We were sure of that. Because most— | 46:15 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | It was probably up Highway 91, waiting. But we took a back road. He didn't know about that. He would always stop Sherrod and other SNCC workers whenever they came. Most of the time they stayed down in Baker County with different families. But the times that they would go into Albany, they would stop them and harass them. | 0:00 |
| Charles Houston | And would you care to talk about what happened after you went to Washington to testify? | 0:38 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yeah, we were able to get a hearing and I can't remember how all of it came about now, but we eventually got an injunction against the Gator. The Gator had a speed trap, like I said earlier, where no one could come through the county without being stopped. And once we got that injunction, it was— Finally we were able to cool him down a little from some of all that he had been doing. | 0:45 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | I think the federal government had tried in some other cases to deal with him and they just couldn't. Every attempt, even the Albany Movement had a problem because the Gator shot Charlie Ware— I mentioned Ichauway Plantation earlier. As a little girl I can remember every 4th of July there would be this big celebration at Ichauway Plantation and they had a baseball team and other baseball teams would come in. There'd be a big barbecue and Black people would come home to be home for the 4th of July. | 1:18 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | And everybody go down to Ichauway Plantation. And I think this was around '61, '62, somewhere around that time. The White overseer was going with the Black woman who lived on the plantation. I think she was teaching school by then. And anyway, she was talking with— She was seen talking with this Black man, Charlie Ware, several times during the day. So that night the sheriff and the overseer of the plantation whose name was Guy Touchstone, went and got him from his home like White folk would do. And they were driving into Newton with him and when they got outside the jail, the sheriff said something like, "This nigga is coming at me, I'm going to have to shoot him." And he shot him and he said, "this nigga still coming at me." And he had the radio on so it could be heard trying to make it valid. So he ended up shooting him five times. | 1:54 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | But Charlie Ware, like he would always do too, he'd take him to the hospital and it's like he's there, he's expecting him to die but he didn't die. So Charlie Ware— So charges were brought. No, no. The federal grand jury met to consider an indictment of the sheriff and they failed to indict him. So one of the people on the federal grand jury owned a store right down here in Harlem, in Albany, it was a Harlem supermarket I think. And anyway, I don't know why the Movement people were picketing the store, but I assume, I guess I can say now that had something to do with it. He served on the federal grand jury, the owner of the store. So then the federal government came after all of the Movement people. | 3:05 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | And you probably, as you all interview Reverend Wells and talked to him I'm sure he probably talked about that because they were really— Sherrod will tell you that's probably the time he felt the closest to being put away for a long time because the federal government sent 70-some agents in here to try to get the members of the Albany Movement. And I forgot what they call it when you doing something to a juror. But anyway, that was when the Gator I guess had some impact on— Something he did, had an impact on the Albany Movement and really threatened the continued existence of the Albany Movement because they were going after the Movement leaders. Okay, yeah. | 4:05 |
| Charles Houston | So there was a— In the case of the protest of the murder of your dad and perhaps even in the case of the protest of Charlie Ware, what started as protests of criminal violence against individuals in each case became part of a broader effort to redress grievances. I mean it was as a result— I mean perhaps not a direct result of your dad's murder, that the injunction was handed down against Gator to prevent him from arrest, from stopping people at will and— | 5:03 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | And doing some of the other things he had done to Black— Because that's Cicero Robinson, I think Cicero wore a beard and he just cut it off. The Gator was just terrible. I mean you could walk by him on the street and if he didn't like the way you walked at the time he would do something. He was just real bad. So he did a lot of things. I think one of my mother's brothers, I think he hit him or cut him or something. You just didn't know what he was going to do. So it was really a big thing for people to be able to say we just won't take anymore and stand up to him. | 6:01 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | And that was a time too in Baker County '65, this was after I had gone on to school at Florida Valley State. I couldn't go to school in the North anymore because my father was dead. Didn't even know whether I would be able to go to college or not once he had passed. But I was able to get in at Florida Valley. Loans and so forth. And so that September the White people decided to burn across in front of my mother's house. My sisters, we've been going over this. I went to Cincinnati the other weekend. I was sitting talking with my sister about it. But my sister said she was up studying for a government exam and so she kept, you know, could see cars coming, the lights coming from around the curve and to see a lot of cars coming at one time said it got her attention right away. | 6:45 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | And she went and told my mother. So by the time my mother came out to see what was going on, they had come out in front of the house and put this cross up and with burning. So she told them to turn all the lights out and she told— This my sister, the one that's next to me to get on the phone and call the sheriff and to call some other Black men in the area. And then my mother got the gun and went out on the porch and started shooting. She was also able to see and recognize some of the White people who were out there. My sister called, she mentioned one of my uncles and other relatives that she called. And my understanding is that a lot of Black men showed up. They didn't just come straight in. They got out in the woods with guns and they were actually almost surrounding these White people. And I think one or two of them started shooting. Because the White people also, they also shot toward the house. | 7:53 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | And my mother was out there on the porch shooting as well. And then these Black men came and so the White people realized they were in danger at that point. So they left right quick and then eventually the sheriff came and the GBI came and mother said the GBI came over to her after he had talked with the sheriff. And she said, she told him, you talked to the person you need to talk to. I don't see what else you would need to ask me, but she could name some of the people. And the sheriff was saying, no, she had that wrong. And anyway, nothing ever happened with that. And I think that was September of '65. I'm fairly certain if it wasn't September was the beginning of October of '65. | 9:04 |
| Charles Houston | Oh GBIs got a Georgia Bureau— | 9:57 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Of Investigation. | 10:00 |
| Charles Houston | Investigation. Was that the first time that Black men had responded with force to White violence? And was there a subsequent— Were there reprisals against any of those? | 10:07 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | I think by then they saw, I think White people maybe finally saw that Black people were sticking together after Bloody Saturday and other things that had happened during the summer. And then a lot of these people who were active in the Movement also lived on the plantations, which was an interesting thing because you would think that they would've been put off. In fact, one person, Richard Wright, I don't know whether Richard is still living on the plantation or not, but he was very, very active and worked on the plantation. | 10:22 |
| Charles Houston | On Ichauway? Because I mean that of course is very interesting because the people who lived on the plantation were dependent for their livelihoods. The very Whites against whom the whole community had grievances in many cases. Well or against their agents. And the impression I've had from others is that— I don't really misquote anybody, but the impression I have is that particularly out in the county that the more visible protestors, the more active people were people who were off the plantations who were not dependent and that people lived on the plantations as well as people who had public jobs like school teachers tended to be sympathetic and supportive to the extent of helping you prepare meals, doing things out of sight of Whites. But were reluctant to stand forward on the front line. | 11:03 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Well Richard was definitely an exception because he was very active in the Movement. He's now holiness minister. I think they call him Apostle Reverend but not Reverend. Apostle Wright. But during those years— And he played on the Ichauway baseball team, but he was very active in the Movement | 12:28 |
| Charles Houston | In many ways it sounds as though— I mean the Movement may have started in '61, but it sounds as though '65 was kind of a turning point— | 13:08 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | For Baker County. Yes. It was like Black people decided in Baker County, we just aren't going to take anymore. And that led to some— The fact that my father's death led to people coming together in the county saying we just we're just not going to take anymore. Really was the beginning of a new Baker County. The Gator, once the injunction was there in place— Excuse me, I think toned down some. I used to tell one of my uncles who was just adamant about not coming back to live. I used to tell them, "You ought to come back because Baker County is totally different from the way it was in earlier years." My mother ran for office in '76 or was it '77? '76, I think she was the first Black elected official there in the county. And this wasn't all that much longer after my father was murdered. | 13:21 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | And this interesting she'd tell you about her first board meeting. She said the man who was superintendent was really one of her relatives, Eugene Hall. And he was asking her about different family members and this was before they started and she was asking him about different ones and then when they got ready to start the meeting, the superintendent said they were glad, they were glad to have Grace Miller as a new board member and this there's an old White man on the board and trying to know who she was. I think the superintendent was trying to tell him she was Joe Hall's daughter. And he said, yeah, "The nigga Joe Hall—." How did he put it? "Best nigga I ever known," something like that, he said. And so mother said, everybody else you could see they were sort of cringing a little. | 14:43 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | And she said, "That's okay, he's old." And she said, "I can kind of understand because he's old." But there are times when I might slip up and say Cracker. Because we use that too. But she's been on there since '76 on the board of education. She was the first Black elected— | 15:54 |
| Charles Houston | Still serving. | 16:26 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | She was the first Black elected official in the county. Mr. T. Kunny ran for sheriff during those years of the Movement. '60— I guess maybe it was '66 or so. He's strong Black man who just didn't take anything from anyone. | 16:27 |
| Charles Houston | I don't know much about it, but earlier we were talking about the cooperation among your family members in operating their separate farms, which were really part of one big family continuum. But I understand there was a cooperative farm or there was a you— part of the Movement? | 16:59 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. My work and the Movement was not only in Baker County because I had made this commitment, then I was committed to life for working for change. So I didn't just work in Baker, although I've always tried to go home and bring change. So that's why back in the around '70, I organized the only preschool program for Black children because we didn't have one before then. And then I started branching out and working in other counties. Can you tell me your question again? | 17:29 |
| Charles Houston | I wanted you to talk if you— | 18:17 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Oh, about the farm. Okay. So while working in other counties doing voter registration, voter education, working on welfare for rights and other problems that would arrive arise, people were getting put off the land. I was trying to remember the year also, there were a lot of different things happening. Maybe in while talking to some of the people, y'all have heard the story of Dorothy Young. Right. | 18:19 |
| Charles Houston | That was in '62. December of '62— | 18:50 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | No, no, she would've been around '68. I remember my daughter was, well '67, '68, somewhere around that time. Okay. My daughter— No, no, it would've been '68, '69. My daughter was very young at the time when they brought the children over here to the detention center. Anyway, my point is I'm working along with my husband and others working in Movements in a lot of different counties in Southwest Georgia. | 18:55 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | And people were being put off the land and we wouldn't have answers for that. And during the summer of '68, seven people went to Israel to study the Kibbutz and they came back and we started meeting and decided to start an organization that we would call New Communities Incorporated. And New Communities would be a land trust that would go about the country buying land and holding it in trust and turning it over to local community development corporations. | 19:27 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | So we got our hands on the first piece of land in '69. One of the people on the— And the group was Slater King. One of the people who had gone to— Well Slater and his wife, Marion, had gone to Israel along with Sherrod and two or three White people who were from the North and couple of other Black people who were from the South. And so Slater was a real estate agent and therefore knew of the availability of this farm just north of here, about 25 miles north in Lee County. It was called Feather Field Farms. It's 4,800 acres of land. | 20:23 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | We decided to try to get that land. It was $225 an acre as I remember it was a million and something $1,065,000 or something like that. | 21:11 |
| Charles Houston | $245 an acre you said? | 21:26 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | $225. Okay. $225. And ideal piece of property, because the main highway from Atlanta ran right through it. We had two and a half miles of highway frontage on US-19, had a railroad, a railroad that went through it with a spur onto the land. Had about three creeks. Would've been a really nice piece of land had we been able to hold onto it. But anyway, once we settled the deal on 4,800 acres— And what was happening, the financing for that was one year financing because this was during the years of OEO, Office of Economic Opportunity and the Nixon administration. And we had been assured that we would get funding to develop this community. Once the financial arrangement, the one year financial arrangement had been made for that piece of land. Then another White person had 937 acres of land that he wanted to sell. And it was like, oh the arrangement was really good. | 21:27 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | I used to be able to say it right away. But anyway, the payments were very reasonable. So that piece of land was pulled in. So it was 4,800 plus and 937, actually 6,000 more or less. The tax books had 6,500 on record but it was 6,000 more or less. So we had, here we were with 6,000 acres of land, we got a direct grant from OEO to plan, to put the proposal together. So this company out of Washington DC was hired. I'm sure they had connections with the Nixon administration somehow. But we had gotten a hundred thousand dollars grant and I think they got most of that to help us put this proposal together. So we had charrettes that would see the house where the family had lived before we got the land. This is big brick house. Was there and then there's a big shed. We put plastic up and set up meeting spaces under that shed and had a lot of charrettes. | 22:53 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | We had gotten about 500 families who signed saying they were willing to move on to the farm. So we brought people together to talk about the kind of community they wanted. So through the charrettes and other meetings, people decided what kind of educational system they wanted, what kind of health, what kind of industry. We ended— Where the villages would be located. Because there would be, I think we had sites for three villages. How people would interact with each other on jobs managers. It was all real. I'm thinking sometimes it was really before our time, but we decided what would happen on every bit of that land. The kind of houses, everything. | 24:08 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | During that year of planning though, White people saw what was planned, they couldn't figure out how this could have happened. I think they had a much different plan. And as you see what's happened in later years, you that they had a different plan for Lee County. But so we would have incidents of shooting at some of the buildings and then they started an attack both from the congressional and state level. | 25:02 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | The congressman from our area entered into the congressional records that we were communist. And so they started this big fight to try to stop what was happening there so that by the time the proposal was ready, OEO, which had said they would give us this direct grant, wouldn't do it. They were afraid by now. And they sent us, instead of giving a direct grant from Washington, like they had done for the planning grant, they told us we had to go through the state A95 process, meaning we had to get local support and state support for this funding. | 25:34 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Lester Maddox was governor of the state of Georgia. When we met locally with White people, they had the TV cameras there to blast us all over Southwest Georgia. And Lester Maddox was the governor who vetoed the grant. So at that time people were saying it just wasn't possible to do what we had planned to do. Those of us locally decided that we'd never had our hands on this much land and we couldn't just give up that just that, just let it go. So we decided that we would try to fight to keep it. So for the next three years from '71, '72 or was it six? It was either '69, '70, '71 or '70, '71 and '72 we faced foreclosure by Prudential Insurance Company who held the first mortgage on the farm. | 26:23 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | And we fought it off for three years straight until we were finally able to get some better arrangements financially. In the meantime, we had started farming because farming was all we knew to do at the time, none of us had operated a farm that size before. And I'm sure we made some mistakes. We operated in a different way from most farms. We had a farm manager, but we also had a farm committee and all of the workers on the farm were a part of that committee as well as the manager and three people from the board. | 27:41 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | So the workers in a sense had the opportunity to change anything that— To override anything the manager was able to do out there. And I don't think people were used to— People were used to being treated another way on a plantation, if you want to call it that. They weren't used to being a part of and having ownership of this, it was hard for people to understand that the farm didn't belong to one or two people. It belonged to all of us. It was hard for Black people to buy into that concept. So it was easy for White people to try to show them that you don't really own anything when in reality it belonged to all of us. | 28:26 |
| Charles Houston | But what Whites were able to do then is to persuade— Is to persuade some people that they had no real interest in it? | 29:17 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | They did that. They did it at Koinonia as well. But anyway, what happened to us, one of the things that happened to us is when we got the money, we got some better financing and some grants. The people who gave the money insisted that we put five people on our board of their choosing. These people came from other places and one of them had to be the chairman of the board. | 29:27 |
| Charles Houston | So it was the financing companies, the grant agencies— | 30:00 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Grant. | 30:04 |
| Charles Houston | The grant agencies insisted that they'd be able to appoint five board members. One of them would be the chair, | 30:05 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | And they came from Mississippi and other places. Some White, some Black. And one of those board members asked us if we could take this man in who was from California, who just needed a place to stay. He didn't need to make any money. But what he did, he came there and started trying to make people think that you don't have anything. And he really started organizing among people who had ownership of everything there. It was the most shocking thing. And I can remember when they first— They put a picket line up, some of the workers, not everybody. In front of the farmer's market, our own people. And Sherrod was saying it's healthy. And we trying to get him to see this is not healthy. Now what we later found about this person, he was there under an alias, he was that the name he gave us was not his real name. | 30:12 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | And since then I've learned that he went and just tore up other organizations as well. So I've often wondered whether or not he was an FBI plant or some plant from one of the agencies during those years. There had to be a connection because I was talking to another person who said they saw him out in California on TV at some demonstration and they wanted to call out there and tell people what he had done to at least two or three organizations that this person was familiar with. But at any rate, we got through that and everything worked out okay with that. But of course it put it in the news because the news was glad to be able to come. And anything dealing with Sherrod in the area, he's the one who came here and started the Albany Movement. So anything with him makes news whether it's true or not in the area. | 31:21 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | But anyway, it was in the news for a short time and then it died down and we continued on. But what happened was that some of the funders backed away, but we could still make it. And then the droughts started. We had a drought in '76, drought in '77 and a drought in '78. It forced us to have to go look to the government to try to borrow money. I mean you just can't bounce back from those years of loss, that many years of loss. | 32:26 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | So it forced us to go to Farmers Home Administration to try to get an emergency loan and the county supervisor who was White said we would get one over his dead body. So of course by now Carter is in office and we had to deal with the Carter administration to deal with this county supervisor. So what they did, they sent three people down from Washington and one from one— The only, the lone Black person they had in the state office down to go with us to the county FHA office. | 33:13 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | And we finally got a loan. But to me that was the beginning of the end as well. That's just another layer on because what happens in Farmers Home is that they get all available assets and they sort of tie your hand. They even do it today. And so that we had a year of rain and then the droughts right behind, I mean since '76 we've had more years of drought than we've had years like this like the one we having this year— | 33:57 |
| Charles Houston | [indistinct 00:34:32]. | 34:30 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | So back to back problems like that. And you end up where you can't fully pay the notes but you can't maneuver even though you have assets because FHA has— | 34:34 |
| Charles Houston | Control. | 34:49 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. So they were able to use that control to keep us from paying the first lien holder. And then Prudential Insurance eventually foreclosed and I think it was around '83 or so though, we had this White guy who offered to buy the entire farm and I think he offered us something like four point something million dollars. And he was offering us less though than a White guy who was located next to us. We didn't want to sell the farm. Looking back, we should have done it because we could have taken the profits and gone and paid for another farm. But we didn't. We were trying to hold some part of it and then he finally just decided he didn't want to do it. Well that's who eventually bought the place at auction for about $3 million less than what he offered to buy it for. Yeah. So we lost it. It was sold in 1985. | 34:50 |
| Charles Houston | Well now I wasn't sure though of the entity which— What was the name of the entity which was created at the time that you found out that this 4,800 acre farm was available? I mean you conceived of the idea of creating a kind of cooperative venture which would provide farms for 500 families. And so you incorporated, I mean you formed a non-profit or association— | 35:55 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | It was a— New Communities Incorporated was a 501(c)(4), which is like a for-profit. We didn't have to pay taxes on profits. So it was sort of like a non-profit, but it's different from 501(c)(3). But New Communities Incorporated was the organization. Now, if you remember that idea for New Communities was really to go around the country buying land, holding it in trust and turning it over to local community development corporations. We just got bogged down in the first piece of property we tried to try to purchase. | 36:36 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. So the original concept was to do this on a national basis but on a much smaller scale in each location. And you would— So something— And I don't really know much about the conservancy. Where you acquire the land and then you find a local association to take it over— | 37:16 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | We buy it and turn it. | 37:35 |
| Charles Houston | You back out. Okay. | 37:36 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Yeah, that was the original idea. But this piece of property which was larger than the state of Rhode Island and the largest piece of property that Blacks owned, that was in one mass. In one piece, in the country. So they're still groups who write to us for information because New Communities was like the model for others. So we still get requests. | 37:38 |
| Charles Houston | But you needed a whole different set of management skills for what you ended up— For the task you ended up being— | 38:07 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Right. See we were trying to be where everybody felt ownership and helped to manage. I mean it was just a new kind of way of dealing, not your regular manager telling— I mean like the plantation owners so to speak, or to overseer on the plantation. It was just a different way of operating that a lot of people weren't. | 38:14 |
| Charles Houston | But that didn't work so well? | 38:42 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Looking back, I don't think it did. Although people had— For example, one of the tractor drivers, the question of who would move into this big house that these White people had lived in. Well we made the decision that one of the tractor drivers, he had a large family should move into the house. They moved in there, but the wife asked to move out after a while because she said it was too much house. I mean they weren't used to living in something like that, but it was totally— They just couldn't imagine that people would make the decision that they should move in the house. That's not the way things operate. The head or whoever they consider as the head is who you put in there. But wasn't the way we operated. It was just different. | 38:44 |
| Charles Houston | Well you learned lots of things. Maybe there'll be an opportunity to— | 39:37 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | I don't know. I tell people now, folks say, well we probably want to do that again. I don't think that, because I was so deeply involved in that for 15 years. I spent just about every day out there on the farm. It was a real big, big— Oh it was such a big loss. When I knew it was going to be over, I can remember walking out on the farm and thinking, well this is probably my last time walking down this road and so forth. And that was when I made a decision then. Because now, even though I wasn't getting much money during the years that I worked in the Movement after I married, we lived on very little because we had a Movement. We had to try to keep going and therefore any money I made went into a common treasure that we all lived out of. | 39:42 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | So that's the way— Yeah, I tell people that now they go, God. But that's anytime I made money— And so if I drew a salary from working out at New Communities, I didn't ever see my paycheck because it went to the Southwest Georgia Project, which was the organization, that was the organization we created after Stokely said Whites had to go from SNCC and we had a lot of White people working with us. So we broke away and started the Southwest Georgia Project for Community Education Incorporated. So until 1977 or '78, any money I made went straight to the Southwest Georgia Project, and see we had a lot of people who were families in that organization and that's how we did— | 40:41 |
| Charles Houston | Everybody drew on. | 41:35 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Our utilities were paid, rent was paid, we'd get a small amount of money for groceries and stuff. And then you had to try to survive. And that's how we kept the Movement going in all of these different counties because we were all involved. And we'd get grants from time to time. We had a print shop operating. We had to keep that going. We were buying property on Monroe Street. We've turned it into apartment buildings now. | 41:38 |
| Charles Houston | I have a friend who lives there. | 42:09 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Okay. | 42:11 |
| Charles Houston | And in fact, his name— At least, I think this is the same place. It's 307. Willie Jackson. | 42:12 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Oh, okay. | 42:21 |
| Charles Houston | 111 year old minister and I was there talking— | 42:22 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Well see downstairs was our print shop that was a old grocery store back during those years. And we were able to get that property. And so we operated a print shop, we did newsletters and stuff. And then the upstairs was apartments. | 42:25 |
| Charles Houston | Now, so everybody who belonged to the project who was a member of the project, I mean it sounds like a time, I mean you just give your salary to the project and everybody, did everyone do that? | 42:43 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Basically everyone— As some of the guys married in later years, sometimes their wives wouldn't. And that's basically why I just decided things have just got to change and made that decision around '78. But we had a lot of people at one time, we'd get students who would come in. I remember one person, Linda Youngblood, she went to New York University and she came down one summer and had one more year to go in school. And when she finished school, she came back to work with us. So she and I worked together out in the office and other places on the farm. I started daycare program out there and other things. So our salaries would just go, we didn't ever see our paycheck because our money went to the Southwest Georgia Project. | 42:54 |
| Charles Houston | And it then took care of your living expenses. | 43:50 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | And then that's how we were able to buy property and keep the Movement going because gas allowances and stuff. | 43:53 |
| Charles Houston | But was that a condition for joining the project? For becoming a member of the project? Did you have to agree that you— Because otherwise it would be— | 44:01 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | I don't know. I guess we talked about it and decided we had to do it or I don't know whether Sherrod was the one who— I really don't know how we got into doing that. But in order to— We would meet often. We met a lot and we didn't have to have discussions about the money. We just sort of handled it. | 44:14 |
| Charles Houston | And when you say the project paid your expenses, I mean your living expenses, would it pay mortgage or just rent? | 44:35 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Rent. | 44:50 |
| Charles Houston | But if someone were buying a house, would it pay for that too? | 44:52 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Well, if it wasn't mortgage, then the rent it would've been. Because that's what I eventually did. A friend of my husband's came down to visit and I guess he thought things should just be different for us. They had gone to school together. So he actually gave the money for the down payment on a house and also gave some other things to us. So in that case, the rent, the payment on the note wasn't— It wasn't even as much as rent would've been. So we would give him the rent, I mean the mortgage payment. | 44:54 |
| Charles Houston | And do things mean, does the project still operate that way? | 45:32 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | No. | 45:35 |
| Charles Houston | And you said that changed around '77. | 45:37 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Well, I guess that was partly the reason why it changed. I just decided with other wives coming in and they're getting their expenses paid out of the common treasury, but they are also keeping whatever they were making. At some point you think maybe this has to change. And I made the decision to do that in '70. | 45:38 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | It was interesting when I made the decision to do that, because I had to actually go to the farm committee to say that I didn't want my paycheck to go to the Southwest Georgia Project anymore. And by then— So we had lost some people at New Communities because we didn't have as much funding. And so I was doing the job of that four other people had been doing, but that its this one person here handling four jobs really. And so I told the committee that I no longer wanted my paycheck to go to the Southwest Georgia Project. | 46:01 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | And of course Sherrod was a part of the committee and he was against that. But then the committee also was aware that if I couldn't get my check to stop going there, then I was leaving. So they voted to for me to get my check. Isn't it something? And so then Sherrod made a motion that the pay be lowered to $3,000 a year. | 46:41 |
| Charles Houston | You know what— | 0:02 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Jog my memory, though. | 0:03 |
| Charles Houston | Okay. Well, probably the most difficult, maybe if we start with the really difficult stuff. | 0:05 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Okay. | 0:10 |
| Charles Houston | It's, I need to know the names of your brothers and sisters. | 0:10 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Oh, okay. | 0:15 |
| Charles Houston | And when they were born. | 0:15 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Okay. I can— | 0:16 |
| Charles Houston | Where and their children. | 0:16 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Okay. We'll start from the top? | 0:21 |
| Charles Houston | Sure. If you, you know, in order of birth. | 0:23 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Okay. You want my— | 0:26 |
| Charles Houston | Brothers and sisters first. | 0:27 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Okay. | 0:29 |
| Charles Houston | And then I can copy it. | 0:29 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Do you want me to say it? | 0:32 |
| Charles Houston | Well, no. I can just copy it. | 0:33 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Okay. | 0:35 |
| Charles Houston | And I'll go ahead and turn this off. | 0:35 |
| Shirley Miller Sherrod | Okay. | 0:37 |
Item Info
Related Items
The preservation of the Duke University Libraries Digital Collections and the Duke Digital Repository programs are supported in part by the Lowell and Eileen Aptman Digital Preservation Fund