Reverend Charles Sherrod was a civil rights activist based in Albany, New York. His strategy of building community ties with students, churches and local organizations helped form a model for the national fight against desegregation. Sunday TODAY’s Willie Geist remembers a life well lived.

The Rev. Charles Melvin Sherrod, whose grassroots organizing of unregistered black voters sent shock waves through the segregated South and kickstarted the Albany Movement, has died. He was 85. Sherrod, whose death was confirmed by his family, died of natural causes at his home in Albany on Tuesday at 3:45 p.m. “He was a great husband, a great father and great servant to his community,” Sherrod’s wife of 56 years, Shirley Miller Sherrod, said. “His life serves as a shining example of service to one’s fellow man.”  Sherrod played a transformative role in the civil rights movement during the 1960s, cofounding the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and inspiring blacks in southwest Georgia to straighten their backs and stand up for their rights.