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.

By Chris Horn

It was 1968, the year assassins' bullets cut down Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, the year of ugly violence at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. And it was the year that civil rights advocate Cleveland Sellers came to a deadly crossroads—and kept moving forward.

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.

Sellers, director of Carolina's African American Studies Program, is known as a veteran of the 1960s civil rights movement and as an individual who preferred dialogue to violence even as other civil rights leaders veered toward militancy. His youngest son, Bakari, is in his final semester at Carolina's law school and was elected in 2006 as the youngest member of the S.C. legislature.

That the elder Sellers would one day become a faculty member at Carolina or that he would have a son elected to the state legislature would have seemed preposterous ideas in 1968. The Palmetto State of 40 years ago had no African-American legislators, and the University had been integrated only five years.

Earlier in that decade, Sellers, a native of Denmark, S.C., had 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 Nonviolent 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.

Sellers' pardon in 1993 was an official pronouncement from the state that justice had not been served with his conviction. An editorial in The State newspaper concluded that the pardon was “long, long overdue” but represented a “significant step toward reconciliation and the healing process.”

Sellers already had moved on in one sense: with graduate degrees from Harvard and UNC-Greensboro, he had been working in education and community service, and his teaching appointment to Carolina in 1995 led, eventually, to his directorship of the African American Studies program. From that pulpit, Sellers has tried to instill in students of every color a sense of where America has been and where it needs to go to reach for better harmony among different races and socio-economic classes.

Looking back, Sellers believes there is room for yet more reconciliation surrounding the Orangeburg Massacre, whose 40th anniversary will be observed at the end of February.

“I'm still waiting on the state of South Carolina to address this,” Sellers said. “We have gotten an apology, but we need some investigation and effort to find out why the Orangeburg Massacre happened. People who believed in justice and truth and equality were victims of the Orangeburg tragedy as much as those who were wounded and killed.”

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.