“The Courage to Hope” by Shirley Sherrod with Catherine Whitney
© 2012, Atria $24.99 / $28.99 Canada 240 pages, includes notes

Some days, you get a little bit of exercise.

You hear a good story and you pounce on it. You spin it to make it funny, bend the facts for more entertainment and jump to conclusions to make it interesting. The truth might get stretched but when you’re running a good tale, who cares?

Someone does – especially if it’s about to ruin their life. In the new book, “The Courage to Hope” by Shirley Sherrod (with Catherine Whitney), you’ll read about one such event.

Shirley Sherrod was born facing racism. Her father owned their family farm, but the county in which it sat was ruled by whites who relished their positions.

Jim Crow laws were enforced for longer than elsewhere and federal laws and mandates were basically ignored. Sherrod’s own father was killed by a white man who was never punished for it.

At this same time, though she didn’t know him then, Shirley’s future husband was working hard within the Civil Rights movement.

When they first met, she thought Charles Sherrod was too skinny. She admits she wasn’t very impressed with him – until she heard him speak. Weeks later, they were inseparable, then married and Sherrod joined her husband in the movement.

Because she’d come from farmers, Shirley knew she wanted to work on behalf of farm families. The Sherrods purchased good Georgia land and established a communal farm, modeled on a kibbutz that Charles had visited. “Creativity” led to a farm-fresh market operated from the farm’s grounds.

But when the farm was lost, the activist in Shirley Sherrod reappeared. She fought discrimination that occurred during the loss and started officially working for farmers. That ultimately led to an appointment to the position of Georgia state director of rural development.

Though it seemed, at first, that the office was meant to help black farmers, Sherrod saw that farming wasn’t a racial issue. All farmers needed help and she was happy to get involved.

So happy, in fact, that she said so at an NAACP meeting.

It was a speech that was dissected and started a firestorm.

Filled with grace, dignity and indignity, “The Courage to Hope” seemed to me like a double book, one part then and one part now. Fortunately, both are impressive.

With a voice that still seems a bit baffled by what occurred, Shirley Sherrod (with co-author Catherine Whitney) writes about confusion and outrage following the manipulation of parts of her speech that led to her very public job loss in 2010.

Sherrod very squarely lays blame in this book, and though she doesn’t accuse President Obama or his staffers, she’s not complimentary.

I liked Sherrod’s life story, which is the other part of this book. It shows readers the foundation that gave Sherrod strength, and it’s a very good (although cringe-worthy) peek back in time.

This is one of those books that makes you want to yell, cry, and stand up and cheer. It’s outrageous and triumphant and if you can handle that, then “The Courage to Hope” is a book to leap at.
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The Bookworm is Terri Schlichenmeyer. Terri has been reading since she was 3 years old and never goes anywhere without a book. She lives on a hill in Wisconsin with two dogs and 12,000 books. Her self-syndicated book reviews appear in more than 260 newspapers.