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Book by Cleveland Sellers, Jr.
The River of No Return
* * *
* *
Remembering the
Orangeburg Massacre and Its Aftermath
Commentary Compiled by Rudolph
Lewis
At the Center of Things
In 1967, while organizing students
at South Carolina State University, Cleveland Sellers,
Jr. was shot in a melee that later became known as the
Orangeburg Massacre. Three students died, and many were
wounded; Sellers alone was indicted and convicted for
inciting a riot and served time in jail, as he had for
resisting the draft, a case that was later dismissed.—Avery
Wounded during a
confrontation between police and unarmed demonstrators
that left three students dead and 27 injured on the S.C.
State University campus, Sellers was charged with
rioting, imprisoned for seven months by the state, and
later pardoned. Those are the bare facts of a much
larger tale of integrity and redemption, the saga of an
individual who struggled for societal change during a
tumultuous era in the South and passed on his ideals to
a son who is now becoming a change agent in his own
right.—SC.edu
Seller’s activism
and academic career have their roots in a fateful day in
February 1968 when student protesters and state police
clashed on the South Carolina State University campus.
In what became known as the “Orangeburg
Massacre,” three men were killed and 27 wounded,
including Sellers. The only person arrested as a result
of the incident, Sellers spent seven months in prison on
rioting charges. Twenty-five years later he received an
official pardon.—
Wittenberg
As a young man, he
was known for his involvement in the
African-American Civil Rights Movement through
SNCC. He was the only person convicted and jailed
for events at the Orangeburg Massacre, a 1968 civil
rights protest in which three students were killed by
state troopers. Sellers' conviction and the acquittal of
the other nine defendants was believed to be motivated
by racism, and Sellers received a full pardon 25 years
after the incident.—Encyclopedia
* *
* * *
Cleveland Sellers
“The Mississippi
experience was almost like being in a war zone. You were
constantly under attack. Our protection was with the
black community. People would shelter us as we moved
from house to house . . . that was our salvation”
First, the murder
of Emmett Till, then images
of students being beaten at lunch counter sit-ins,
brought
Cleveland Sellers to the movement for civil rights.
At
Howard University [1963], he joined student protests
against segregation, picketing the Justice Department
and the White House. On a march opposing the appearance
of Alabama governor
George Wallace in Cambridge, Maryland [May 1964], he
was tear-gassed by National Guard troops. After the
murders of
Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner
[ June 21, 1964], Sellers went to Mississippi,
becoming the SNCC project director there. Despite police
and Klan violence and intimidation,
SNCC set up community centers and freedom schools,
organized civil rights actions, and even helped harvest
crops. Later [8 February 1968], he was wounded by state
trooper gunfire that killed three students at South
Carolina State College after they had tried to
desegregate a local bowling alley. Then he, not the
police, was put on trial.—From the
set: "Portraits: Social Activists of the Last Century."—Flickr
The son of
Cleveland and Pauline Taggart Sellers, Cleveland
Sellers, Jr. was born in 1944 in Denmark, S.C., where
his father was a businessman and his mother worked as a
teacher at the South Carolina Area Trade School. Sellers
attended local schools and started a student chapter of
the NAACP. He attended
Howard University [enrolled1962] and worked with the
Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in
various civil rights causes around the South and was
elected Program Secretary in 1965.—Avery
In 1960, in
response to the
Greensboro sit-ins, Sellers organized a sit-in
protest at a Denmark, South Carolina lunch counter. At
age 15, he was active for the first time with the Civil
Rights movement. [After the 1960 protest, Sellers'
father had forbidden his son's jeopardizing himself by
becoming an activist.] During his boyhood, Sellers
joined the
Boy Scouts of America and attended the
1960 National Scout jamboree in Colorado Springs,
Colorado. Although Sellers completed the requirements
necessary to become an
Eagle Scout, "his paperwork was lost" and he was not
formally recognized with the honor until December 3,
2007 at 64 years of age, more than four decades after it
was earned.—Wikipedia
Sellers . . . set
out to study mechanical engineering at
Howard University in Washington, D.C. But highly
publicized lynchings and
the slow pace of civil rights progress ate away at his
sense of justice, and he volunteered for the
1964 Freedom Summer voter registration drive in
Mississippi. There, searching for the bodies of three
murdered student volunteers, Sellers got an up-close
look at the dangerous world of civil rights activism.
“My parents were reluctant about me getting involved in
civil rights,” Sellers said. “My dad wrote me a letter
in 1964 and basically said, ‘Son, you've made your
contribution—it's time to come home.'”
But Sellers was fully committed to the civil rights
movement and soon became national program secretary of
the
Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee . He
became known for his unwavering resolve and willingness
to communicate without bombastic words.
Returning to South Carolina in the late 1960s, Sellers
was drawn to the student demonstrations in
Orangeburg, S.C., that would lead to the
Orangeburg Massacre—an incident that barely rippled
the waters of the national press but later gained
significance as a milestone in the history of American
civil rights.—SC.edu
The leadership of
SNCC thought that the
Johnson Administration was trying to silence SNCC by
drafting its leadership. Sellers graduated from Howard
in 1967. After graduation, he returned to South
Carolina.—Encyclopedia
* * *
* *
An Official View of the
Orangeburg Massacre
The Orangeburg
massacre was an incident on February 8, 1968, in which
nine South Carolina Highway Patrol officers in
Orangeburg, South Carolina, fired into an armed
and violent mob protesting local
segregation at a bowling alley. Three men were
killed and twenty-eight more injured, hitting most of
them in their backs. After the shooting stopped, two
others were injured by police in the aftermath and one,
a pregnant woman, later had a miscarriage due to the
beating. The incident pre-dated the
Kent State shootings and
Jackson State killings [editor's parenthesis]. . . .
[At a press
conference the following day,
Governor Robert E. McNair said the event was ". .
.one of the saddest days in the history of South
Carolina." McNair blamed the deaths on outside
Black Power agitators, but subsequent investigations
showed this allegation to be without basis and untrue.]
That night,
students threw firebombs, bricks and bottles, and
started a bonfire. As police attempted to put out the
fire, an officer was injured by a thrown piece of
banister. The police stated that they believed they were
under attack by small arms fire. A newspaper report said
“about 200 Negroes gathered and began sniping with what
sounded like 'at least one automatic, a shotgun and
other small caliber weapons’ and throwing bricks and
bottles at the patrolmen.”
Protesters insisted
that they did not fire at police officers, but did hurl
various objects and insults at the police. Evidence that
police were being fired at the time of the incident was
inconclusive. While no evidence has been presented that
protesters were armed or had fired on officers, a 1968
newspaper article reported that students threw firebombs
at buildings and that the sound of apparent sniper fire
was heard.
Officers fired into
the crowd, killing three young men: Samuel Hammond,
Henry Smith, both SCSU students, and Delano Middleton, a
local student at Wilkinson High School. Twenty-eight
others were wounded during the shooting or after in
police abuse.—Wikipedia
* * *
* *
The Orangeburg Shootings
The shootings
occurred two nights after an effort by students at the
then almost all-black college to bowl at the city’s only
bowling alley. The owner refused. Tensions rose and
violence erupted.
When it ended, nine students and one
city policeman received hospital treatment for injuries.
Other students were treated at the college infirmary.
College faculty and administrators at the scene
witnessed at least two instances in which a female
student was held by one officer and clubbed by another.
After two days of escalating tension, a fire truck was
called to douse a bonfire lit by students on a street in
front of the campus. State troopers—all of them white,
with little training in crowd control—moved to protect
the firemen. As more than 100 students retreated inside
the campus, a tossed banister rail struck one trooper in
the face. He fell to the ground bleeding. Five minutes
later, almost 70 law enforcement officers lined the edge
of the campus. They were armed with carbines, pistols
and riot guns—short-barreled shotguns that by dictionary
definition are used “to disperse rioters rather than to
inflict serious injury or death.” But theirs were loaded
with lethal buckshot, which hunters use to kill deer.
Each shell contained nine to 12 pellets the size of a
.32 caliber pistol slug.
As students began
returning to the front to watch their bonfire go out, a
patrolman suddenly squeezed several rounds from his
carbine into the air—apparently intended as warning
shots. As other officers began firing, students fled in
panic or dived for cover, many getting shot in their
backs and sides and even the soles of their feet. Davis
recalled in his oral history interview: “The sky lit up.
Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! And students were
hollering, yelling and running. I went into a slope near
the front end of the campus, and I kneeled down. I got
up to run, and I took one step; that’s all I can
remember. I got hit in the back.”
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Later, Davis lay on the
bloody floor of the campus infirmary, head
to head with Hammond, a friend and quiet
freshman halfback who also got shot in the
back, and watched him die. Smith, a tall,
slender ROTC student who had called his
mother at two a.m. to tell her about the
“shameful” beating of the female students by
policemen, died after arriving at the
hospital with five separate wounds.
Middleton, a 200-pound high school football
and basketball star whose mother worked as a
maid at the college, died after asking her
to recite the 23rd Psalm for him and then
repeating it himself while lying on a
hospital table with blood oozing from a
chest wound over the heart.
Of 66 troopers on
the scene, eight later told FBI agents they had fired
their riot guns at the students after hearing shots.
Some fired more than once. A ninth patrolman said he
fired his .38 caliber Colt service revolver six times as
“a spontaneous reaction to the situation.” At least one
city policeman—he later became police chief—fired a
shotgun.—Jack Bass,
Niemanwweb
Two black demonstrators
killed in the Orangeburg Massacre lie on the
ground at the edge of South Carolina State
College in Orangeburg on February 8, 1968.
Following three days of protests, which
began when blacks were barred from entering
a bowling alley by the proprietor, state
police and national guardsmen confronted
demonstrators. Three students were killed
and 27 wounded. Photo courtesy of The
Associated Press |
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* *
* * *
The Aftermath
At the trial, the
first federal trial of police officers for using
excessive force at a campus protest, all nine defendants
were acquitted. The activist
Cleveland Sellers was the only person convicted and
imprisoned (7 months) as a result of the incident. He
represented the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and
was convicted of having incited the riot that preceded
the shootings. In 1973 he wrote
The River of No Return: The Autobiography of a Black
Militant and the Life and Death of SNCC.
Twenty-five years later, Sellers was officially
pardoned. . . .
The shootings at
Orangeburg predated the
Kent State shootings and
Jackson State killings. This was the first incident
of its kind on a United States university campus. The
Orangeburg massacre received relatively little media
coverage.
Historian Jack Bass
attributed the discrepancy in media coverage, compared
to that for later events, to the fact that the victims
at Orangeburg were young black men protesting local
segregation. In addition, the shootings at
Orangeburg happened at night, when media coverage was
less. At Kent State,
in contrast, the victims were young whites protesting an
increasingly unpopular and highly politicized U.S. war
in
Vietnam. They were attacked by members of the
National Guard, which the media may have judged a more
inflammatory aspect of the shootings. Other analysts
have noted that later events in 1968, such as the
assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and
candidate Robert Kennedy, as well as the
Tet Offensive
overshadowed the events at Orangeburg.—Wikipedia
At a noon press
conference the next day in Columbia, South Carolina,
Governor Robert E. McNair called it “one of the saddest
days in the history of South Carolina” and referred to
“this unfortunate incident.” He expressed concern that
the state’s “reputation for racial harmony had been
blemished.” Contrary to all evidence, McNair also said
the shooting occurred off campus. He placed blame on
“black power advocates” and added other inaccurate
embellishments.—Jack Bass,
Niemanwweb
South Carolina
State University's
gymnasium is named in memory of the three men. A
monument was erected on campus in their honor and the
site has been marked. All-Star Triangle Bowl was
integrated. The Floyd family has maintained ownership
and operation of the business.
In 2001 Governor
Jim Hodges was the first governor to attend the
university's annual memorial of the event. That same
year, on the 33rd anniversary of the killings, eight
survivors told their stories at a memorial service.
Robert Lee Davis told an interviewer,
"One thing I can
say is that I'm glad you all are letting us do the
talking, the ones that were actually involved, instead
of outsiders that weren't there, to tell you exactly
what happened." The state general assembly recently
passed a resolution recommending that February 8 be a
day of remembrance for the students killed and wounded
in the protest.—Wikipedia
* *
* * *
Cleveland Sellers as Educator
In 1969, Sellers
taught a black ideology course at Cornell University;
and later received a Masters Degree from Harvard
University. Living in North Carolina, he worked for the
city of Greensboro in the Human Resources Department and
later as a Housing Administrator; he became involved in
many North Carolina related Civil Rights and black
consciousness projects, including Malcolm X. Liberation
University. He worked in Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988
Presidential Campaigns and received his Ed. D. from the
University of North Carolina at Greensboro in education
administration in 1987. He was pardoned for his
conviction in the Orangeburg Massacre in 1993, and went
on to become Director of African American Studies at the
University of South Carolina.—Avery
[Sellers] is the
Director of the African American Studies Program at the
University
of South Carolina. His scholarly interests include
recording the history of protest tradition,
civil rights history, and the experiences of
Africans in the Diaspora. He focuses on the oral history
of African Americans who shaped the history of South
Carolina, including cultural groupings and the languages
of
Gullah,
Creole, and
Ghegee. He also has studied the survival experiences
of African Americans, sometimes recorded in folklore but
often unrecorded. In 2008, Sellers was selected as
president of
Voorhees College in South Carolina.—Encyclopedia
* * *
* *
Cleveland Sellers as Husband and
Father
Sellers and his wife Gwen have
three children, two sons and a daughter. His youngest
son is South Carolina state Rep. Bakari T. Sellers. At
age 24 (DOB September 18, 1984), B.T. Sellers is one of
the youngest state lawmakers in the
United States. Elected in November 2006, he is still
completing his law degree at the University of South
Carolina.—Encyclopedia
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Father and
Son
Cleaveland Sellers and Bakari Sellers
By
Chris Horn
Forty
years after surviving one of South
Carolina's deadliest racial incidents,
Carolina professor Cleveland Sellers is
still working for change. And so is his son
Bakari, a University law student and the
state's youngest legislator. Sellers plans
to return to writing in the not-too-distant
future, and looks forward to seeing his son
carry the torch for improving lives and
understanding among all South Carolinians.
Bakari Sellers is eyeing graduation from law
school this spring and plans to seek
re-election to the House of Representatives
in November. Like his father, he wants to
see real change in society, especially in
what he calls “a culture of low
expectations.” |
 |
“I have a book project in mind, one that challenges
black churches and the NAACP and issues a call to
grass-roots activism. There were epic events in the mid
1960s in civil rights that changed society for the
better,” Bakari said. “We need more of that boldness
now.”
Jack Bass, a College of Charleston communications
professor and former national journalist who co-wrote
The Orangeburg Massacre, is impressed with the
young Sellers. “Bakari is a one of the brightest, most
capable young politicians I've ever seen. And I say that
as someone who interviewed Bill Clinton when he was 27,”
Bass said. “Bakari has a strong sense of values
instilled by his parents; there is a strong moral
component to his public policy.” So the story that began
40 years ago with a young man committed to the ideals of
equality continues with his son who shares those same
ideals. A torch from one generation has kindled a flame
in the next.—SC.edu
Orangeburg Massacre 40th Commemoration Ceremony
(Cleveland
Sellers, Jr. Speaks)
Bakari Sellers interviewed by Julian Bond
Julian Bond
interviews Bakari Sellers, a Democrat who represents
District 90 in the South Carolina House of
Representatives, in this installment of "Explorations in
Black Leadership." Bakari Sellers became the youngest
member of the South Carolina Legislature when elected in
2006 at age 22. He is the son of civil rights activist
and educator Cleveland Sellers, who now serves as
president of Voorhees College. The series is presented
by the Institute for Public History at the University of
Virginia.
* * *
* *
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The River of No Return
The Autobiography of a Black Militant
and the Life and Death of SNCC
By Cleveland Sellers and Robert Terrell
Among histories of the civil rights
movement of the 1960s there are few
personal narratives better than this
one. Besides being an insider's account
of the rise and fall of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, it is
an eyewitness report of the strategies
and the conflicts in the crucial battle
zones as the fight for racial justice
raged across the South. This memoir by
Cleveland Sellers, a SNCC volunteer,
traces his zealous commitment to
activism from the time of the sit-ins,
demonstrations, and freedom rides in the
early 60s. In a narrative encompassing
the Mississippi Freedom Summer (1964),
the historic march in Selma, the
Democratic National Convention in
Atlantic City, and the murders of civil
rights activists in Mississippi, he
recounts the turbulent history of SNCC
and tells the powerful story of his own
no-return dedication to the cause of
civil rights and social change. |
The River of No Return is acclaimed as a book
that is destined to become a standard text for those
wishing to perceive the civil rights struggle from
within the ranks of one of its key organizations and to
note the divisive history of the movement as groups
striving for common goals were embroiled in conflict and
controversy.
* * *
* *
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The Orangeburg Massacre
By
Jack Bass and Jack Nelson
In
federal court more than a year later, a jury
took less than two hours to acquit nine
troopers charged with imposing summary
punishment without due process of law. The
trial uncovered stark facts about this armed
attack on a college campus, and this
evidence helped immeasurably in research
that a fellow Nieman, Jack Nelson, and I did
in writing
The Orangeburg Massacre, a book
first published in 1970. The book has been
accepted by historians as the definitive
account of what happened that night and of
actions that took place in its aftermath.
In the
fall of 1970, two-and-a-half years after the
shooting, a jury in Orangeburg convicted
Cleveland L. Sellers, Jr. of “riot” because
of limited activity at the bowling alley two
nights before the shooting. Sellers, who had
grown up 20 miles from Orangeburg, had
returned from the Deep South combat zone of
the civil rights struggle as national
program director for the militant Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
The presiding judge threw out charges of
conspiracy to riot and incitement to riot,
but the charge of riot stood. |
 |
“Nobody here
has ever put the defendant into the area of rioting
on Wednesday or Thursday [the night of the shooting]
with the exception that he was wounded and that to
my mind means very little,” the judge commented.
Sellers, who is profiled in the book as “the
scapegoat,” served seven months of a one-year
sentence in state prison, with early release for
good behavior.
In a November
1970 report on the Sellers trial in the Southern
Patriot, Dave Nolan (now a historian for civil
rights and other issues in St. Augustine, Florida)
wrote that had the shooting happened “earlier, there
might have been a public outcry. But this was 1968,
not 1964, and in the intervening years civil rights
demonstrations had come to be seen as ‘riots’—and
most whites seemed to feel that it was justified to
put them down as brutally as possible.” He suggested
that the slaughter of the Vietnam War had so
brutalized the public mind as to make three black
lives “seem that much less important.”—Jack
Bass,
Niemanwweb
* *
* * *
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Documenting the Orangeburg Massacre
Campus killings of black students
received little news coverage in 1968,
but a book about them keeps their memory
alive.—Essay
by Jack Bass
Scarred Justice: the Orangeburg Massacre
1968 (video)
Scarred Justice brings to light
one of the bloodiest tragedies of the
Civil Rights era after four decades of
deliberate denial.
Tyrone
Caldwell, a student at South Carolina
State College, shook his finger at law
officers after arrests were made when
black students were barred from an
all-white, private bowling alley in
Orangeburg, South Carolina, February 6,
1968. Windows were smashed, cars
overturned, and police hospitalized
before the crowd dispersed.
Photo courtesy of The Associated Press. |
posted 9 February 2011
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* * *
A Day of Remembrance: the Orangeburg Massacre
/
Archival Documentary 1-2 The Black Power Mixtape
James Loewen on telling the truth about Confederates
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The Shadows of Youth
The Remarkable Journey of the Civil
Rights Generation
By Andrew B. Lewis
With deep admiration and rigorous scholarship, historian Lewis (Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table) revisits the ragtag band of young men and women who formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Impatient with what they considered the overly cautious and accommodating pace of the NAACP and Martin Luther King Jr., the black college students and their white allies, inspired by Gandhi's principles of nonviolence and moral integrity, risked their lives to challenge a deeply entrenched system. Fanning out over the Jim Crow South, SNCC organized sit-ins, voter registration drives, Freedom Schools and protest marches. Despite early successes, the movement disintegrated in the late 1960s, succeeded by the militant Black Power movement. The highly readable history follows the later careers of the principal leaders. Some, like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, became bitter and disillusioned. Others, including Marion Barry, Julian Bond and John Lewis, tempered their idealism and moved from protest to politics, assuming positions of leadership within the very institutions they had challenged. According to the author, No organization contributed more to the civil rights movement than SNCC, and with his eloquent book, he offers a deserved tribute.—Publishers Weekly |
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* * * *
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Michelle Alexander: US Prisons, The New Jim Crow
/
Judge Mathis Weighs in on the execution of Troy Davis
 |
The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
By
Michelle
Alexander
The
mass incarceration of people of color through the War on
Drugs is a big part of the reason that a black child
born today is less likely to be raised by both parents
than a black child born during slavery. The absence of
black fathers from families across America is not simply
a function of laziness, immaturity, or too much time
watching Sports Center. Hundreds of thousands of black
men have disappeared into prisons and jails, locked away
for drug crimes that are largely ignored when committed
by whites. Most people seem to
imagine that the drug war—which has swept millions of
poor people of color behind bars—has been aimed at
rooting out drug kingpins or violent drug offenders.
Nothing could be further from the truth. This war has
been focused overwhelmingly on low-level drug offenses,
like marijuana possession—the very crimes that happen
with equal frequency in middle class white communities.
|
* *
* * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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