Sherrod's steadfast motto: 'Let's work together' - CNN.com

Sherrod's steadfast motto: 'Let's work together'

By Jim Kavanagh, CNN

July 21, 2010 5:45 p.m. EDT

After her father was shot to death by a white man, "I decided to stay in the South and work for change," Shirley Sherrod said.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

• Shirley Sherrod forced out of USDA after excerpted speech posted on internet
• Sherrod, raised on Georgia farm, has 45-year civil rights record
• White man killed father; white sheriff stopped husband-to-be from registering to vote
• "If I tried to hate all the time, I wouldn't be able to see clearly," she says

Atlanta, Georgia (CNN) -- Shirley Miller Sherrod has spent most of her life fighting injustice.

On the Baker County, Georgia, farm where the Miller family grew corn, peanuts, cotton and cucumbers and raised hogs, cows and goats, oldest daughter Shirley despised the work.

"I swore I would never have anything to do with a farm past high school," she said Wednesday with an easy chuckle. "I would talk to the sun as I picked cotton and picked cucumbers and worked out there in that hot field, and [say], 'This is not the life for me.' I didn't want to have anything to do with agriculture ever again."

On the night in 1965 when her father, Hosie Miller, a black man and a deacon at Thankful Baptist Church, was shot to death by a white farmer in what ostensibly was a dispute over a few cows, Sherrod -- then 17 years old -- changed her mind.

"I decided to stay in the South and work for change," said Sherrod, now 62, who believes her father's killing was more about a Southern black man speaking up to a white man than about who owned which animals. The all-white grand jury didn't bring charges against the shooter.

That summer, when she and several other blacks went to the county courthouse to register to vote, the county sheriff blocked the door and even pushed her husband-to-be, Lester SheSherrod's steadfast motto: 'Let's work together' - CNN.com