Josephine Price Sherrill Family photographs

Josephine C. Price Sherrill was the youngest daughter of Joseph Charles Price & Jennie (Smallwood) Price. Her father was the founder of Livingstone College in Salisbury, NC. Price Sherrill was born Dec. 28, 1893 and died Feb. 7, 1985. She was the wife of Richard W. Sherrill and at one time served as Livingstone College Librarian. Joseph Charles Price (1854-1893) was an important leader of the black community in his time, a career of possibly national stature cut off by his early death of Bright's Disease. Much of the credit for the survival of Livingstone College must be given to Price, as a fluent and persuasive orator, educator and religious leader whom Josephus Daniels of the Raleigh News and Observer called "the most remarkable Negro I have known." He was born in Elizabeth City to a free mother, Emily Pailin, and an enslaved father, Charles Dozier. When Dozier, a ship's carpenter, was sold and sent to Baltimore, Emily married David Price, whose surname Joseph took. Educated in the schools of New Bern, N.C., where his family moved in 1863 to be behind the Union lines, he became a teacher in Wilson in 1871. He attended Shaw University briefly in 1873 and was converted to Christianity. He earned the A.B. degree from Lincoln University, graduating as valedictorian in 1879, and earned his B.D. there in 1881. He had been licensed to preach in 1876. He was engaged in the North Carolina temperance movement briefly before his trip to London. Price delivered the commencement address at the famous Tuskegee Institute on two occasions, and in 1890 he addressed the National Education Association, speaking on behalf of Negro education. In 1888 he turned down an offer of the post of U.S. Consul at Liberia, convinced that he could do more important work at Livingstone. In the year of Price's death, Frederick Douglass endorsed him as the best hope of the black population.