My mother and father, P. D. and Foda B. Sherrod, Sr. allowed our home to house a shortwave radio station used for communication by SNCC students working with the Mississippi Civil Rights Movement in Hollandale, Ms. Dad was one of the key leaders in our local movement. I assisted with handling the calls through the radio.
As an eight student, Chuck Carpenter,a white student from Ohio State University and I integrated Coker's Cafe in downtown Hollandale in 1962. We entered the cafe and sat together and ate a hamburger and drank a coke. We were overcharged for both items: $1.00 vs $0.25 for the sandwich and $0.25 vs $0.10 for the soda. I also participated in intergration of the movie theater. A group of students sat downstairs in the movie theater after church one sunday. The picture was blurred. No whites were in the theater. One saturday morning, during a march on Jitney Jungle Food Store, encouraging them to hire black cashiers, my father avoided being run over by a car driven by white men by jumping on top of the car.
While attending Tougaloo College I participated in demonstrations. I was the first student from Tougaloo College to go to Harvard Medical School. I have continued to speak out for equality and civil rights in the medical profession during my training as a Pediatric Infectious Disease Specialist/Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholar/masters in Public Health Services Administration at UCLA and while serving on various committees, including the Advisory committee on Immunizations Practices at the CDC and through the American Academy of Pediatrics, the National Medical Association, The Association of Black Women Physicians of Southern California of which I am the Founder/Founding President.
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