Shepard was born in St. Agnes Hospital for Negroes on the campus of Saint Augustine's College in Raleigh, North Carolina and raised in Garner, North Carolina.

 

His parents - father Louis Lee, with formal education only to the third grade, was skilled in many areas of work, and mother Verna Mae, a high school graduate who worked various jobs opened to a Black woman in her day - came from enslaved people turned landowners on his mother's side and sharecroppers on his father's.

 

His grandfather Willie and grandmother Sallie, deeded their land to each of their seven children before his grandfather passed. Lot 6 in the Sallie Whitaker Land Subdivision Survey was his mother's plot, which is where his father built the family home.

 

His mother motivated him and his six siblings to attend college, and his father stressed the importance of work and, by example, demonstrated that work is your friend.