My Vanishing Country

by Bakari Sellers

  She’d tell my father, “I don’t much like him.”

  “He’s your little brother,” my father would say. “You have to be nice to him.”

  I might have seemed like an old man at times to my sister, but I was also a child, with immature boyish ways. My family will be the first to say that no one could tell me what I couldn’t do. And I freely admit, for one thing, I’m a crier like my dad. I get emotional and passionate about what I like, and what I believe I can do, and upset when I feel life is unjust or when something terrible happens to good people.

  When I was eight, Duke University, my favorite team, lost the NCAA Division Regional final to Kentucky. I cut a fool. My family won’t let me forget how I sprawled out on the floor of our den and screamed like someone was beating me. When my recreation basketball team lost in middle school, I lay out in the center of the gym, in front of everybody, screaming and crying and proclaiming we lost because the team was so horrible.

  I could be just as passionate about justice and right and wrong. Pop often tells people, “Bakari, even as a little boy, was a slick talker. He’d debate anybody. I told him he was going to be a lawyer, or a politician, and he became both. Bakari would debate people on ‘Why you want to fight that person? They didn’t do anything to you.’”

  Nosizwe saw me not as a lawyer in training but as a hyperarticulate and overly confident child, but I was also filled with anxiety, which makes for an odd character to both children and adults. Nosizwe and I had funny arguments about who was smarter. I think she wanted to try to prevent me from growing arrogant, though she was really not equipped to know how to do that. She’d say, “There’s a fine line between confidence and arrogance. We both came from the same mama and daddy, and they taught us to do the same things. Whatever you can do, I can do too. I just chose in this world to be something else.”

  My smart mouth annoyed Nosizwe to no end, though we eventually became, and to this day still are, very close. And despite her initial irritation, my sister was like a second mother to me. When she was in medical school, most weekends she’d drive the ninety miles from Charleston to Denmark to come get me. I’d hang with her, talk to her girlfriends, eat at fancy restaurants, and go with her on dates. I called her “my mother-sister-friend.” When I’d come to her with a problem, she’d ask, “Are you coming to me as if I’m a mother, sister, or friend? Because I’m not your parent, and I might go straight to Daddy with what you’re about to tell me.”

  Although at the time I thought she just wanted to be around me, I now realize she was trying to give me a rest from a home filled with growing tension.

  Recently I heard Nosizwe say, “Bakari taught me how to show affection. He was the ‘I love you’ kind of kid. Let me lay my head under you. We are very close. We were not huggers in our home. I do not hug my mom to this day, but Bakari taught us a different way. How could you not respond to a child who hugs you and tells you ‘I love you’?”

  * * *

  When I was a teenager, I tried my hand at picking melons. You could make $250 a week picking cantaloupe and $350 picking watermelons. You’d wait on the side of the road for farmers to pick you up in their trucks and take you to various farms. All day long you’d get in a line and pick up melons, or rather throw them. Good money, but the work was hard. Needless to say, for me, it got old fast.

  Even though Denmark was black, there were still a few white establishments. And my father, in his day, couldn’t eat at those white diners, and he couldn’t try on clothes in the white stores. And yet, he grew up solidly middle class in Denmark, participated in Boy Scouts, read comics, and was an acolyte at St. Philips Episcopal Church on the campus of Voorhees College. He also attended middle and high schools on the college campus, too. When he was a boy, he asked his parents if he could try his hand at picking cotton. They agreed, though they whispered to one another that he wouldn’t like it. And just like my watermelon picking, he didn’t last long—two days.

  * * *

  In the Bible Belt, church was foremost, but we weren’t those people who went to church on Monday, Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday. Neither were we the “Easter families,” the ones who go to church all dressed up once a year. We went to church every Sunday. When my grandparents were alive, I dreaded going to church with them because that meant we had to attend two churches—Bethel AME and Rome Baptist Church—because my grandparents, weirdly enough, and I still don’t know why, attended two churches. When we moved to Denmark permanently in 1990, we became members of St. Philips. The mayor went there, as did the president of Voorhees College and some of the teachers in town.

  Like my father before me, I was an acolyte (equivalent to an altar boy) from the time I was six. I lit candles, carried the cross, and assisted the pastor in anything he did. During communion, we served real wine. When no one was paying attention, the acolytes would finish off the leftover wine—and top it with a swish of used holy water.

  Although we weren’t the most religious family on the street, my parents were very prayerful. We always said grace before every meal; even now I say grace. I may not say it out loud, but I always close my eyes and bow my head, no matter who I’m with.

  * * *

  The Sellers name conjured up pluck and honor, and also some pain in Denmark. Using Game of Thrones as a reference, we were the Starks of Winterfell. Pop often got a smackdown for being around the Sellers. “You think you better ’cause you with the Sellers,” people would say to him. But Pop was no fool. When he got in trouble, he’d quickly use the Sellers name like a charm.

  My father returned to Denmark because he believed he needed to complete what his parents had set out to do—to uplift a community that had sunk into poverty. My grandfather, Cleveland Sellers Sr., was a respected businessman in Denmark. Everyone knew him because you either ate fish sandwiches at his cafes or he drove you around in his cab. You even might have patronized his juke joint, or if you were visiting the local colleges, you stayed in his motel. A World War II veteran, he had twenty rental properties and a six-room motel, which now sits empty by the old family home. My brother recalls playing in my grandfather’s office, watching him loan people a little money, more than a bank would give them, but knowing also how to get his money back. When people needed something done—maybe a son was in jail or someone owed money they couldn’t afford—they’d call my grandfather.

  My grandmother came from Upstate, in Abbeville. She was a product of two loving parents—a white father, who couldn’t live with his black family, and a black mother. She became a dietitian at what’s now known as Denmark Technical College. She worked with the homeless and was a board member of the NAACP. When my father realized that a boy in his school was eating food from the garbage, my father told his mother, who began making her son an extra sandwich each day to give to the boy.

  When my father was ten years old, he heard about the killing of a fourteen-year-old boy named Emmett Till. The Chicago boy was visiting his grandfather in Money, Mississippi, in 1955 when he was murdered for allegedly whistling at a young white woman. Mamie Till, Emmett’s mother, insisted on having an open casket at his funeral, leading to the picture of her son’s mutilated face being published in Jet magazine and other media. A mainstay in every black home, Jet lined living room tables or was tucked neatly on bathroom shelves. It included celebrity stories, crime briefs, and a little gossip. Jet seeped into the collective psyche of black folk and figured out exactly what we wanted to read. There were also pictures of black beauties in swimsuits, which boys like me rushed to see every week.

  When Jet published the picture of Till in his open casket, black kids all over carried the magazine to school. My father’s African-American teachers didn’t shy away from telling the students the truth, even though the textbooks my father used described black people as lazy and even set forth rules about how blacks should be handled. Till’s death, the teachers explained, meant black boys and girls had a job to do—to end injustice against our people.

  Till�
�s death took hold of my father, so much so that at age sixteen he was inspired to organize a sit-in demonstration at a local white restaurant in Denmark. All over the United States, little brown boys and girls with names like Stokely, Jesse, Kathleen, Angela, and Cleveland were reading Jet, and they came together years later in massive demonstrations during the 1960s. My father’s inability to forget the face of a murdered black boy is also what motivates me to this day and what got my father in so much trouble in the first place.

  You see, in Denmark, people knew my last name for something else too.

  That’s where my story begins.

  I

  The Wounds Have Not Healed

  “Don’t Be a Dead Hero”

  February 8, 1968, is one of the most important days of my life—even though it was sixteen years before I was born.

  That day about two hundred black students at South Carolina State College attempted to desegregate an all-white bowling alley in Orangeburg. After several days of protests, highway patrol officers lined up along an embankment and fired into the group of unarmed students. They killed three young black men, all age eighteen or younger—Samuel Hammond Jr., Delano Middleton, and Henry Smith—and shot and wounded twenty-eight others.

  The tragedy took place in eight to ten seconds—the time it takes for two sips of coffee or to tie your shoes. It’s the amount of time a bull rider must remain on a bull to score. Sociologists say it takes eight seconds to make an impression on someone. And it took that amount of time to shatter so many lives.

  In those few seconds, the sky lit up with gunfire, students fled for their lives as they were being pelted in the back, in the head, and in the soles of their feet with buckshot from shotguns hunters used to kill large game like deer. One youngster was shot in the face, knocking out sixteen teeth; bullets pierced another’s heart; and yet another, a high school student waiting for his mother, a maid at the college, was hit six times.

  The shooting stopped as fast as it started, but for some it never ended.

  One of the people wounded that night was Cleveland Sellers, my father. A young, married civil rights activist at the time, my daddy was arrested, thrown in a jail cell, and was the only person to spend time in prison for instigating a riot that never happened.

  My parents have always talked to me about the Orangeburg Massacre. I am pretty sure it was whispered to me when I was in my mother’s belly.

  I’ve also heard the story from the mouths of those wounded that night. I’ve heard it from the relatives of the dead, and of course I’ve heard it from the “agitator” himself. And with each hearing, I always discover something new.

  I am a child of the civil rights movement. There’s a photograph of me in the arms of “Uncle” Jesse Jackson, who was holding me while I fed a horse. I was the campaign baby during his second run for president in 1988. He was just one of my many “uncles” and “aunts,” all of them legends and famous in their own right. I grew up answering the phone and then saying, “Dad, Uncle Julian [Bond] is on the phone,” or “Uncle Stokely [Carmichael] wants you,” or “It’s Aunt Kathleen [Cleaver].”

  And while those uncles and aunts have inspired my success, they also connected me to the past, providing me with a useful playbook for the years to come.

  My sister was right. I was a strange child, a very old soul. My father was intentional with me, and I was receptive. He never stopped showing me the realities of life. Maybe my sense of purpose was developing sooner and faster than in most children. As a result, my early knowledge of the injustices of the civil rights era has left me with a heavy heart, even as a child, with so many tears but also with hope—and a mission. My father’s path and my own are tangled together over the same bloody ground. My goal, like his, is to help heal this nation’s divide.

  My father, who always explained what happened that night with great deliberation and calm, was sure to mention every name involved in the Orangeburg Massacre because he didn’t want us to grow up thinking that the only civil rights heroes were Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. Heroes, he wanted us to know, still walk among us.

  The story he tells about the massacre often comes with great imagery, as he and I trek to South Carolina State where it all happened. He points to where the trash can was positioned that allowed him a few seconds after being shot in the left arm to get away from the police and to help another wounded student. Or he points to where the students stood on a little hill where the police fired shots at them.

  In 1968, my father was only twenty-three, a year older than I was when I became a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives. Back then, he was a well-known leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Several years earlier, he had dropped out of Howard University in order to work with SNCC in Mississippi, where he searched for three missing activists.

  My grandfather was against my father’s activism because he could see the rising tension on television, and my father kept him updated in letters. In one letter my grandfather begged Daddy to come home. “The motel plan is waiting for you. Please come home, you have been away long enough. It’s time for you to return to school. I can’t sleep,” he wrote. “I am always thinking about you. . . . If you want to fly home call me. I will make all arrangements. Please let me see you Thanksgiving. We are planning to see Gwen [his sister]. Please don’t be a dead hero.”

  * * *

  My father had promised his mother he’d go back to college and get his degree. Orangeburg was the perfect place to fulfill that promise because it had two historically black colleges and was located only about twenty-five miles northeast of Denmark. The town of fourteen thousand people also had something else: a history of protest. The Orangeburg Massacre was part of a longer narrative. Student demonstrations were nothing new in that community.

  My father’s friend Martin Luther King Jr. had delivered speeches in Orangeburg—and presided over the small wedding ceremony of my father and his first wife in the famous basement of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. The newlyweds rented a house in Orangeburg, and my father set about trying to teach African-American history and empowerment to its black residents.

  That winter, students at South Carolina State had other ideas. They had their minds set on desegregating the local All-Star Bowling alley. My father, however, believed the time for sit-ins, marches, and demonstrations had passed. Instead, his goal in Orangeburg was to ignite an interest in the black power movement, black identity, and African history. Although not a student at State, he found an audience on campus. The members of the student chapter of the Black American Coordinating Committee knew my father was a veteran activist and that he had worked closely alongside Stokely Carmichael, his former roommate at Howard University, and Dr. King.

  “We were not interested in the bowling alley until the students got beat up,” he explains to me. “With three [consecutive] nights of gunfire, I recognized the tension had escalated. We tried to work with the administration and faculty to see if we could come up with strategies and help the students get out of the box they were in.”

  The violence started on Tuesday, the second day of the protest, when a student was arrested for cursing at a patrolman. Angry about the arrest, a large crowd of mostly students from South Carolina State, about three hundred in all, returned to the parking lot of the bowling alley. The mood was tense, but not violent until a fire truck showed up, infuriating the demonstrators, who remembered a thousand peaceful protesters being hosed several years earlier in Orangeburg.

  When someone shattered the glass door of the bowling alley, “about fifty policemen rushed out, swinging wooden batons and just slamming them down on dozens of co-eds, who ended up with lacerations across their heads and beatings across their backs,” my father remembers. “In some cases, police were on either end holding the girls by their arms while another officer came down across their backs with batons.”

  Why is this so important to me, and why should it be important to all of us? We have to reco
gnize the inequity of authoritarianism and its violent remnants that remain today. People always question whether racism is involved when unarmed African Americans are shot by police. But do we really need researchers, such as those from Boston University in the Journal of the National Medical Association in 2018, to tell us that structural racism is definitely related to police shootings? The university’s public health researchers said people are wrongfully assuming that individual cops are out to get black people; rather, the problem lies within “all of society” and how it has treated black people for centuries.

  Back in the 1960s, my father knew what could happen to someone like him. “Accidents do happen,” he always says. To give you an idea of my father’s commitment to activism, all you have to do is walk through my childhood home. Casually tucked under books in my father’s library is a picture of Dad standing with Martin Luther King Jr. and one of him at the age of eighteen sitting in the Oval Office with President Lyndon Baines Johnson. There’s another photograph of my father with Muhammad Ali, Stokely Carmichael, and Elijah Muhammad, and several photos with Dr. King or with Dad standing or sitting near Uncle Stokely or Uncle Julian.

  In all the photographs, my father is slightly in the shadows of these more boisterous men, because he knew that the loudest become targets. Still, his work and image brought him great attention—especially from the FBI and the governor of South Carolina, who was hell bent on blaming everything that happened in Orangeburg on him. Days before the shooting, my father recognized the not-so-subtle signs that he alone had been chosen to be the scapegoat for the uproar.

  For example, his simple little rental house across from South Carolina State stood out because a tank was targeting it from the middle of the street. “That tank barrel was pointed directly at my house. I knew I couldn’t stay there,” my father says. “That would have been the incident that they needed to get rid of the black advocate. They would have claimed there was an exchange of fire, and they had to use the tank, and they are so sorry that it happened. And I shouldn’t have been there.”