Civil rights activist and minister Charles Melvin Sherrod died this week at the age of 85 in Albany, Georgia. Sherrod joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as its first full-time field secretary in 1961 and was a key figure in the Albany Movement, which galvanized Georgians in the fight against segregation and for voting rights in the Jim Crow South. He later went on to serve as Albany city commissioner and teach at Albany State University. Along with his wife Shirley Sherrod and others, he founded the Black-owned farming collective and land trust New Communities. Shirley Sherrod said of her late husband, “His life serves as a shining example of service to one’s fellow man.”