Funeral services will begin at noon Friday, Feb. 22, for Knoxville attorney Sheryl Clark Rollins, who died Feb. 14 at UT Medical Center after a lengthy illness. The family will receive friends from 11 a.m. until noon at Overcoming Believers Church, 211 Harriet Tubman St. Patton Funeral Home is handling arrangements.
Mrs. Rollins was active in civic affairs, serving at one time as president of the Knoxville Branch of the NAACP. She also served on boards for the Knox County Public Library, the Knoxville Museum of Art and the Beck Cultural Exchange Center and the personnel committee of Knox County E-911.
Mrs. Rollins, 69, a Knoxville native, was called “a foot soldier for change” in her obituary. She graduated from the University of Tennessee with high honors and earned her law degree from UT in 1992. She attended the Institute of International and Comparative Law at Oxford University, England, in 1991. She was one of 50 scholars who accepted an invitation to participate in Harvard University’s Symposium on W.E.B. Du Bois, at the Sorbonne University, in Paris, France.
She was preceded in death by her husband of 43 years, Avon Rollins Sr., a noted civil rights leader who was a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He died Dec. 7, 2016, at age 75.