Sheryll Cashin

Cashin graduated summa cum laude from Vanderbilt University in 1984 with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. She also obtained her masters in English Law with honors from St. Catherine's College, Oxford in 1986 as a Marshall Scholar, and obtained her J.D. with honors from Harvard Law School in 1989.

Sheryll Cashin's family also became the first black family on the block, when they moved in 1966 from Lydia Drive in northwest Huntsville to Owens Drive, at the foot of Monte Sano.

Political involvement and activism were ideals in Sheryll Cashin's family, leading her to pursue racial issues including segregation and inequality. At the start of the civil rights movement in early 1962, Cashin's mother Joan was arrested in a sit-in protest at a lunch counter, while holding the four month old Sheryll. Her father John L. Cashin, Jr., a dentist, was an influential civil-rights leader in Huntsville and Alabama in the late 1960s. He challenged George Wallace in the 1970 Alabama gubernatorial election. He founded a black-led third party in Alabama, the National Democratic Party of Alabama (NDPA), during the height of George Wallace's hegemony and enfranchised thousands of voters whom Jim Crow laws had excluded from the political process. Cashin's great-grandfather, Herschel V. Cashin was a radical Republican legislator in Alabama during Reconstruction. He was born in Antebellum Georgia, and was the child of a white Irishman and a free-mulatto woman.