Her father was murdered by a white man in front of three witnesses in 1965, but a white grand jury in Baker County, Georgia had no interest in seeking justice for a black family. She claims another relative was lynched by the local sheriff, a former white sharecropper named Warren “Gator” Johnson. Her relative was just one one of Johnson’s many victims.

Shirley Sherrod had every reason to hate white people. No one could blame her for harboring venom in her heart against those who oppressed her people and ripped her family apart when she was just 17 years old. Months after her father’s murder, while she was away at college, white men gathered on her family’s lawn and burned a cross. Only the presence of guns in the home and the arrival of armed friends and relatives brought the night to a bloodless halt. It could have been very bad. The family would have been entirely justified in fleeing to cities in the North, as so many black families did at that shameful time in American history.