Shirley Cherry M.L.S. ’75 grew up poor in the segregated South, banned from attending school or walking into a library. On a 100-acre farm where peaches and cotton grew in the Alabama heat, Shirley’s grandmother operated a school and library for the children.
“The library was a hallway with six feet of books and that was my favorite place,” she remembered. “I read everything in there. Little Black Sambo was my first book.”
Her grandmother, mother, and aunts taught her to read and urged her to pursue education. Shirley would later graduate from Tuskegee Institute, earn her masters at URI, and teach public school for 31 years. She became secretary of the R.I. National Education Association, and chaired the NEA’s National Resolutions Committee.
“Segregation, racism, and discrimination tried to keep me from getting an education. And here I was chairing a committee that affects three million educators! But I couldn’t have been a member of the NEA before MLK, Jr.”
Martin Luther King, Jr. has been a persistent force in Shirley’s life and she now serves as tour director for the Dexter Parsonage Museum in Montgomery, Ala., where King began his quest for civil rights.
Shirley’s journey from the farm to the Parsonage wasn’t easy. She moved with her family to Georgia and entered a “training school” while white students attended high school. It was then that she really started to see the differences.
“I’m starting to get the picture that they think white people can be educated but black people need to be trained. It was like how slaves were sent to veterinarians when they were sick while whites went to doctors.”
She petitioned to change the school’s name to honor Ralph Bunche, the first African American Nobel Peace Prize winner. And soon after she became valedictorian of the first class to graduate from Ralph Bunche High School.
“All my life I was taught about my heritage. Every day you go out into the world someone is going to try and define you and you have to define yourself by knowing this is where you came from.”
Shirley and her mother worked 16-hour days as pressers at a dry cleaner and as cooks in a whites-only restaurant to help pay for Tuskegee.
“My mother would press the robes of Ku Klux Klansmen and I would say God made the KKK a part of my scholarship program.”
After Shirley married, she relocated to Rhode Island, had three children, and taught at Portsmouth High School for 28 years. As a teacher, she said she kept a vase of cotton on her file cabinet. If a student told her they couldn’t do something, she would have them touch the cotton.
“I was supposed to pick 50 pounds a day as a child,” Shirley, who now owns her grandmother’s farm, would tell them. “Feel these sticky things that cut your hands and they even had boll weevils! Where would I be if I had said, ‘I can’t?’”