My Vanishing Country

by Bakari Sellers

  My dad was going to talk me through the process over the phone, but Dad used Magic Shave, which I didn’t like. Number one, it stank and burned, and number two, the first time I tried to use it, I couldn’t get all the gook off my face. Also, for some reason, my dad would shave his face with a butter knife—not an attribute I wanted to pick up from him. Luckily, Aunt Florence came through.

  We walked to the bathroom where she showed me how to use warm water to wash my face, how to lather up, and how to put the shaving cream on my face. Then she got close to me and told me to pull my skin a little bit apart so I could have a regular surface and which direction to shave in. Every time I think about my first shave, I see my elderly aunt hovering over me.

  * * *

  Our family had a great deal of respect for Congressman Clyburn and his wife, whom we called Mrs. Emily. The two of them met in jail during the civil rights movement. She offered him some of her sandwich, and they have never been separated since.

  The congressman had a friendly office with people who inspired me to eventually become a lawyer. One of the young men I met and worked with there was Jamie Harrison, who was a celebrity at Orangeburg-Wilkinson High School because he made it out of Orangeburg and went on to study at Yale. He worked for Congressman Clyburn during the day and attended Georgetown law school at night. There was Barvetta Singletary, who knew everything about health-care policy. All of us, including Jarrod, reported to Yelberton Watkins, the chief of staff, whom we affectionately called Yebbie. He was from Columbia, my state’s capital.

  Sometimes I would run errands for Yebbie, which included picking up his nieces from summer camp near Georgetown. He’d give me a little money, and I’d buy them ice cream before taking them back to the Capitol. I also responded to letters from constituents. Every now and then I’d get an opportunity to lead a tour at the Capitol and ride the underground shuttle, an old, electrical subway system linking the Capitol to the Senate and House buildings.

  The most important thing I did was watch and learn from Congressman Clyburn himself. This was long before his successful bid for House Majority Whip in 2019. Back then, Clyburn had been in Congress for ten years. He was on the Appropriations Committee and had accumulated the respect and admiration of his colleagues.

  When you walked into his office, you’d see all of these pictures on the wall of the Briggs family and their fight for educational justice. Harry and Eliza Briggs were plaintiffs in the 1952 Briggs v. Elliott case, which challenged desegregation in Summerton, South Carolina, and became the first of five cases that were combined in the famous Brown v. Board of Education effort decided by the US Supreme Court two years later.

  There were two things you couldn’t dismiss about Jim Clyburn: First, he was unapologetically black. He cared about issues that directly affected black folk. And second, he was a South Carolinian through and through. Contrary to popular belief, South Carolina produces more peaches than Georgia, and every year the South Carolina delegation distributes peaches to everyone in Congress. That summer, it was my and Jarrod’s job to go around and deliver the peaches. We decided to give all the bruised peaches to Katherine Harris, the former Florida Secretary of State, who became infamous during the 2000 election debacle for certifying and awarding George Bush all of Florida’s electors, giving him the presidency over Al Gore. She later became a Republican member of Congress. After getting our peaches, I bet Harris now knows South Carolina produces the most peaches, surely more than her state of Florida, but I’m pretty sure she doesn’t like them!

  Admittedly, Jarrod and I got caught up in the glitzy games of being congressional interns, but more importantly, we began believing that what we dreamed could come true. And whether it was the influence of Morehouse or the environment on Capitol Hill (it was probably both), we dreamed a lot that summer. It was easy to imagine we’d be successful, because we were seeing in DC leaders who looked like us and were doing what we wanted to do.

  People often ask me what they can do to help a young person be a leader or to go out into the world to create change. And I say, when you’re black, the number one thing you can do is to be an example. You can’t tell a black kid to be a doctor if he’s never seen a black doctor. You can’t tell a black kid she can be a lawyer if she’s never met a black lawyer. Jarrod and I were able to see what it was like to be a lobbyist, which is what he became, and a lawyer, which is what I am today. Through examples, we were able to imagine our future selves, and then we believed we could achieve those goals, even though we came from the isolated dirt roads of South Carolina.

  IV

  The Making of a Politician, Part 1

  Parents often approach me and ask, “How were you able to do things at such a young age?” Or they try to compare their own sons to me. I tell them that we always find our niches, but at different times. I didn’t really find my mission, so to speak, until that first summer after my troubled freshman year of college. I was seventeen years old when I started thinking about running for political office. Actually, it was during that summer in Congressman Clyburn’s office on Capitol Hill that Jarrod and I formally plotted my run for South Carolina’s House of Representatives. We had learned that running for office was a science, and we were thrilled that we could understand that science. We pulled data, spent hours and days searching voter registration websites, and investigated everything we knew could help us win in a few years.

  We started examining my future opponent’s record. Thomas Rhoad Jr. was, at the time, an eighty-year-old white man, a former farmer and milkman who had held the seat for more than twenty years. We studied the district lines he governed and who his constituents were, and we realized he was representing a district that was mostly black, including my hometown. We pored over his voting records, attempting to see what he’d done to help improve the area. What we found was what I already knew. The district was socially, economically, and educationally emblematic of a larger problem in South Carolina. We weren’t growing, even slowly—we were declining.

  Jarrod and I spent more time than one could ever imagine studying who voted for Rhoad and where they lived. We also dissected district lines over a twenty-year period. It would all pay off, but that year there was still much more to do.

  When I returned to Morehouse as a sophomore, I was doing what I needed to do to get by, but I had been bit by the political bug. I wanted to build leadership experience, and so I ran for and won my first student government campaign that year. It was a basic college campaign—knocking on doors, putting up fliers.

  But I made it a priority and purpose to cultivate relationships. In other words, I made sure that every single day, I saw people. I mean that in the truest sense of the word: whether it was the janitor, the cafeteria workers, or the president of the college, I always made sure that people knew that I saw them. I did the same with all my classmates, all my friends—all the people I came in contact with every day. It’s a people skill my father and mother instilled in me, and it has real currency in politics.

  I attempted to be affable, and my classmates awarded me by electing me junior class president. My second campaign, however, wasn’t so easy. In fact, it was hell.

  * * *

  That summer coming up to my junior year, in 2003, when I was eighteen, I lived in an apartment complex called the Villages of East Lake with five best friends: Anthony Locke, Rob Hewitt, Jason Mercer, Brian Fitch, and Brandon Childs. The housing in the area was predominately black and inhabited mostly by students. We had two three-bedroom condos that were side by side. That summer, I worked as an intern for the mayor’s office in Atlanta, riding the MARTA, Atlanta’s subway system, every day to work.

  I can’t recall whether I got paid for the internship, but I was scraping by financially. Since I no longer had a college scholarship, I was living off my refund checks, meaning I lived off whatever was left from my school loans. I’d write a bunch of cashier’s checks for six months to cover rent, food, and other essentials. Everything left over had to be rationed
, and I’d make it last.

  The only food we had at the house were potatoes. I would enter the shared kitchen space at the mayor’s office with my two potatoes, microwave them, grab a plastic fork, and then go hide in an office so no one could see me every day eating baked potatoes drizzled with ranch dressing.

  Despite my lack of funds that summer, what I learned back then was priceless. In fact, both Jim Clyburn and Shirley Franklin, then the mayor of Atlanta, inspired my first political slogan: “It’s not about politics but about public service.”

  The mayor had attended Howard University with my dad. He always called her by her maiden name, Shirley Clark, so I never knew who he was talking about. Though she couldn’t be more than five feet tall, Mayor Franklin was a giant. She demanded and commanded respect, but she would always give it back, too. Strangers would stop her on the sidewalks in Atlanta, bending down to give her a big hug. Shirley Franklin dressed to the nines every day, and like the black women of a generation before her, she always wore a fresh flower instead of a brooch.

  Atlanta is a city that’s run by nothing but black folk, and sometimes we allow our petty differences to get in the way of governance. But from my point of view, the mayor was not that way. Instead, Mayor Franklin focused on what was important to the citizens of Atlanta. She never chose sexy issues. For instance, she passionately worked on repairing the water system in the city, which might not be sexy, but it directly affected everyone.

  One thing I learned from working on Capitol Hill with Jim Clyburn, and in the mayor’s office with Shirley Franklin, is that the lifeblood of politics is very simple: relationships.

  Me and my boys had already built a huge alliance, and our notoriety derived from the fact that we were all part of different groups; we built a consensus of very popular and influential people on campus. Brandon Childs was a basketball player. Jarrod, though not living with us that summer, was a rising leader among the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity, one of the traditional and historically black fraternities on campus.

  I wasn’t part of any group but was friendly with everyone. The editor-in-chief of the college newspaper was one of my good friends, and the basketball captain was one of my boys. Like any other school, Morehouse had different crowds—the business guys, the athletes, the fraternity guys, the nerds, the international students, and the gay students. I was friends with all of them.

  That summer me and my boys were also known for our epic parties. Atlanta has always drawn black students from all over the country. In the late 1980s and 1990s, caravans of college students traveled to Atlanta for “Freaknik,” a massive block party of up to two hundred thousand students who would spend $20 million in the city. The young people obviously felt comfortable coming to a city where the people in power looked like them. Another draw was that Atlanta boasted four historically black colleges: Morehouse, Spelman, Morris Brown, and Clark Atlanta University.

  And all their students seemed to show up at our parties that summer of 2003. We didn’t have a lot of money to buy alcohol, so we had to make our drinks stretch. We’d cook up a concoction of Hi-C, fruit cocktail, and 190-proof Everclear, which we marinated overnight in a cooler. We laid plastic on the floor, and I used my Nissan Sentra, which my sister had bought me for my birthday, to break the wood barrier at our apartment complex’s entrance gate. With no barrier, a dozen cars could flow in at once.

  By the end of the evening, about one hundred students had come through. Strangely enough, in those years, neighbors rarely called the police on us.

  * * *

  Politics at Morehouse was serious. Brothers were giving speeches, going over campaign plans; dudes were creating real strategy—I loved everything about it. So in my junior year, and with all the confidence in the world, I threw my hat in the ring for Student Government Association (SGA) president. That decision to run for the top political position on campus made no sense to some people, especially the “SGA guys.”

  Remember, this is a college bred on leadership. It started with Benjamin E. Mays, the late educator, an intellectual, and the longtime president of Morehouse. Son of former slaves, Mays and his extraordinary story influenced some of the greatest civil rights leaders of our time, including Julian Bond, Andrew Young, and especially Martin Luther King Jr., who was only fifteen years old when he arrived at Morehouse. His father and grandfather had also attended the school.

  Dr. King said of his life on campus: “My days in college were very exciting ones. There was a free atmosphere at Morehouse, and it was there I had my first frank discussion on race. The professors were not caught in the clutches of state funds and could teach what they wanted with academic freedom. They encouraged us in a positive quest for a solution to racial ills. I realized that nobody there was afraid. Important people came to discuss the race problem rationally with us.”

  At the time, Dr. King determined to be a lawyer, rather than a minister, revolting “against the emotionalism of much Negro religion. The shouting and stamping. I didn’t understand it, and it embarrassed me.” He questioned whether religion could be intellectually respectable as well as emotionally satisfying. But two people at Morehouse inspired him to give ministry a chance. He wrote that Dr. Mays and Dr. George Kelsey, a professor of philosophy and religion, “made me stop and think. Both were ministers, both deeply religious, and yet both were learned men, aware of all the trends of modern thinking. I could see in their lives the ideal of what I wanted a minister to be.”

  At Morehouse, I too attempted to lay the groundwork for my future as a leader. “Leadership” is an interesting term, because there is no clear definition, but people always define a leader as someone who has followers or someone dripping with charisma. I disagree with that wholeheartedly. For me, a good leader is someone who begets other leaders. It doesn’t make sense if I have followers who are not leaders themselves. However, if I’m doing my job correctly, then other leaders will be with me, will listen to me, and then will go out and lead others. That’s what I learned from Morehouse.

  Martin Luther King Jr. entered the ministry his senior year at Morehouse. My “uncle” Julian Bond, who was a living legend himself during most of my lifetime, also attended Morehouse and remembered King and Mays when he was a student. He described Mays as the quintessential Morehouse man: “He held up a standard of what a Morehouse man should be, and we wanted so badly to come up to that standard.”

  A wordsmith and brilliant orator who spoke at chapel every Tuesday, Mays was King’s intellectual father and model. He would also, sadly, come to eulogize King on campus. Uncle Julian often recalled being one of eight students who took the only class King ever taught at Morehouse. He loved to say, “I am one of the eight people in the universe who can truly say ‘I was a student of Martin Luther King.’” He often recalled seeing King in grocery stores and banks in Atlanta, and then of course later in Selma and the March on Washington.

  Few people know that the actor Samuel L. Jackson, a sophomore at Morehouse in 1968, was an usher at King’s funeral. King’s death shook him and led him to activism. Jackson was expelled from Morehouse a year later after he and other student activists locked up the school’s trustees in a building for two days. One of the board members was King’s own father.

  For a young black man eager to be a future leader, being at Morehouse was equivalent to being a young politician living in Boston or Philadelphia shortly after the Declaration of Independence was signed. There were men who came to Morehouse because they wanted to follow in the paths of these great black leaders. Others arrived at the school with the intention of becoming SGA president. That is how prestigious the position was in a school known to have bred some of the greatest trailblazers in US history. But that wasn’t my interest. I just thought Morehouse could do some cool things for a larger population on and off campus.

  Jarrod always said people underestimated my chances of winning the SGA presidency. “There were a lot of Morehouse guys who felt like they were entitled to be SGA president because they ha
d been student trustees,” he says. “Or they had been correspondent secretary in the previous administration, but this guy, Bakari, clearly didn’t give a damn about any of that. It was clear to students that his world wasn’t confined to the SGA world. Instead, he always had a broad-base reach at Morehouse.”

  The SGA election was packed with talented classmates, such as Lee Merritt, now a preeminent civil rights attorney who has represented women who have accused R. Kelly of sexual abuse and fought against police misconduct and white supremacy. I also ran against Clark Jones, a well-known comedian. But despite all my talented opponents, I still thought I could win. Through winning junior class president, I knew that knocking on every door and building a huge network of support was a winning formula.

  I did win the SGA race, but that was just the first round of a long and hellish election. We had to move my first win to a runoff, because I didn’t get 50 percent of the vote. Then I won the runoff too—which is when I was summoned to the dean’s office. The mother of one of my opponents, who I will not name, called the then–vice president of Student Services Dean Bryce and told him the polls had opened up thirty minutes late. The woman claimed that was an “equal disadvantage,” which I had never heard of in my life. Dean Bryce said the school was taking away my election victory; the entire election had to be done over again.

  I stormed out of his office and called my dad. He knew how hard I had been working on that race. We had knocked on dormitory doors. We had gotten the support of every basketball player we could muster and all the fraternity friends I had. My friends Jarrod, Brian, Jason, Rob, Brandon, and Anthony helped me to galvanize the entire student body.

  I remember about twenty of us marching into a meeting in the freshman dorm called the Living Learning Center. “We’re all supporting Bakari Sellers. We need you to vote for him tomorrow!” We were like a mob, lobbying from one building to another, rolling deep and trying to connect with everyone we knew. We wanted to inspire people with our enthusiasm and energy, but also let them know, This is where you want to be, and these are the people you need to roll with.