My Vanishing Country

by Bakari Sellers

  Banging on doors is tedious, but it’s a necessary political exercise—one that new politicians often don’t practice. Not doing it, though, is the quickest way to get beat. People think all you do is raise money and pay for TV ads, but where I’m from, door-to-door retail, old school Jimmy Carter politics is still important.

  When you knock on a door, you feel a mini-rush. You never know what’s on the other side, you never know how you’re going to be received. All you have is a formulaic greeting and campaign literature that you make sure to leave behind. But you see and meet everyone in their natural element. When people come to the door, they can be shirtless, in boxers and church socks. Or they can be preparing for their next day or going to bed—the key is that you’re meeting people where they are.

  At the end of the day, I was always tired, because I walked miles. My black church shoes had holes so big I could stick two fingers through the soles and touch the ball of my foot.

  Most people were cordial. Even staunch racists usually won’t say to your face what they feel. I’d get calls at the house saying, “Tell that nigga to get out of the race,” but no one said that to me personally. On Election Day, at the voting precinct in East Denmark, a man did try to intimidate voters. He got out of his truck with a shotgun but then got back in his truck. I wanted to win a race, so I couldn’t let such things stop me.

  I spent nine months knocking on doors and also visiting black churches—a different one each Sunday. My goal was to touch everybody three times: knock on their door, send them a piece of mail, and speak to them on their phone. Mailing and phoning cost money, but knocking just costs time. So that’s what I did, all through the district, which included Bamberg County, Springfield, Norway, and the southern part of Orangeburg.

  Then there was a real small part of Barnwell, which I don’t think had ten black voters in that part of town. It was called Hilda. Someone said, “You have to go to Hilda, and you have to go to this country store, and then you have to go in and meet people and shake hands there.” So my one campaign event in Hilda was to visit that store, shake hands, tell people I was running for office—and eat a thirty-five-cent mayonnaise sandwich offered to me by the kind storeowners. I have this real bad reaction to mayonnaise; it’s not an allergy, but I hate it. I took one bite of that sandwich anyway and chased it down with some sweet tea: this is politics too.

  A friend from Morehouse moved to Columbia and campaigned with me every single day. Although Jarrod was now in graduate school at NYU, he was all strategy, making sure we were doing the right things. Kendall navigated me to knock on all the right doors. But, of course, not everyone was helpful. Representative Gilda Cobb-Hunter was a great friend of Thomas Rhoad, and so she went out of her way to campaign for him in churches in my district. I had my Bakari Sellers sign in front of my house in my yard, but Rhoad’s people placed his signs on each side of my signs—in my own yard! Cobb-Hunter wanted to cut my ass, but that’s just politics. In fact, she’s a wildly effective legislator, someone I later worked diligently to get in her good graces. In fact, I’ve patterned my own political career after hers.

  I won only eight of thirty precincts in June 2006, but those districts were large and were many of the ones Jarrod and I had picked out when I was seventeen. As we estimated, those districts were enough to give me the edge I needed to win. At the age of twenty-one, I won my first election, and while still enrolled in law school (now age twenty-two), I took my seat as the youngest-ever member of South Carolina’s House of Representatives. My mother held the Bible as I was sworn in.

  I entered the statehouse complex every day knowing I was walking into one of the most beautiful capitol buildings in the nation. There are twenty-two monuments on the grounds of the statehouse in downtown Columbia. One honors Strom Thurmond, the late segregationist, who was both beloved and despised in my state. His monument was altered in 2004 to include the name of Essie Mae Washington-Williams, a retired African American teacher who was Thurmond’s oldest daughter by an African American maid who worked for his family.

  The grand entrance of the statehouse is lined by twenty-two giant columns, all carved from one piece of granite. Six bronze stars are attached on the outside walls, positioned to cover the holes made by General William T. Sherman and his Union troops, who blasted the statehouse with cannon fire in 1865, the year slavery was abolished.

  A beautiful dome, covered with forty-four-thousand pounds of copper, sits atop the building. The Confederate flag flew above the dome since 1961 to mark the centennial anniversary of the start of the Civil War, and it also remained there as a snub to the civil rights movement. Lawmakers compromised in 2000, removing the flag from above the dome to a thirty-foot pole next to the Confederate monument in front of the statehouse.

  In the back of my mind I always had thought that a deal to take the flag off the top of the dome and put it in the front of the statehouse was just not a good deal. I never thought the flag would come down, but I was resolved from the beginning that we would try our damnedest.

  During my early months in office, I received a call from Anton Gunn, at that time the only member of Barack Obama’s South Carolina election campaign. After coming up short in his own statehouse election, Anton did something that would help change the course of South Carolina’s election history. He landed the job of running Obama’s South Carolina campaign by sitting in the then-senator’s DC office and persuading him of the unthinkable: he could help Obama win the South Carolina primary.

  It would not be an easy task. Hillary and Bill Clinton had a lot of political cachet built among older black elected officials, going back to the 1990s. For example, Darrell Jackson had run Bill Clinton’s presidential campaign in South Carolina more than twenty years earlier. But younger African Americans didn’t have such ties to the Clintons; I surely didn’t.

  On the phone, Anton got right to the point: “We need you to endorse Barack Obama for president.”

  “Man, I don’t know,” I said. At the time, I had narrowed my choices down to Obama and North Carolina senator John Edwards but was leaning heavily toward Edwards. “Nobody’s talking about poverty like Edwards, and he’s from around here,” I said. “He’s handsome, and his campaign headquarters are going to be in the ninth ward,” which was and still is the epitome of black New Orleans.

  Edwards had a platform built around the haves and the have-nots. Unlike most people, who talked only about rural white America, Edwards talked also about the black poor in my community, like those folk who had to ride on a bus for hours each day to work menial jobs. I was impressed by him, though I also felt that something didn’t quite feel right about him. But like everyone else, I was bamboozled and couldn’t see through his veneer. (Edwards was indicted in 2011 for misusing campaign funds to cover up an extramarital affair.)

  Something Anton said on that call, however, prevented me from making a bad decision: “You will never have to explain your endorsement of Barack Obama.”

  I still wasn’t ready to endorse Obama, but that comment made me realize that my constituents could understand why someone like me, a black man and an elected official, would.

  VI

  Dreaming with My Eyes Open

  Becoming a Leader

  I was walking to my constitutional law class in April 2007 when I got a call from Barack Obama himself.

  That morning, a private phone number showed up on my cell phone. I’m terrified of private numbers because it can be one of two people: somebody very important, or somebody working for a student loan company trying to get their money back. That day, it turned out to be the former. “Do you have a moment to speak to Senator Obama?,” I was asked.

  I was shocked, but maybe I shouldn’t have been. “I do,” I said.

  Winning the seat that Thomas Rhoad had dominated for nearly a quarter of a century certainly made me a surprise and a political upset in my home state, but I was getting attention from people outside of Denmark and even beyond South Carolina. With the southern p
rimaries for Democratic presidential elections looming, and my home state being the first of them, candidates in my party began courting me to endorse them. Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden had already called. All this was happening during my first year of law school at the University of South Carolina.

  Still, I didn’t make my decision to officially endorse Obama until he called me that morning as I was leaving my office in the statehouse. With my book bag in tow, I started on my usual two-block trek to class—which involved walking past the coffee shop on my right and Miyo’s Asian cuisine on my left. Once a week I’d stop at Sandy’s for a slaw-dog with chili. Then I’d head to class and return to the statehouse in the early afternoon.

  That morning, Senator Obama asked me what was going on and what was I doing. I told him I was on my way to my constitutional law class. I’d like to think I’m wittier than that, but I had a brain freeze. My constitutional law professor was a great scholar, a fine Democrat, and a good liberal, but I remembered nothing she had taught me at that moment.

  Senator Obama, a constitutional law expert, started peppering me with questions that I just didn’t know the answers to. He wanted to know where we were in our studies and what cases we were looking at. Finally, he said, “Now is the time that I want you to endorse me for president of the United States.”

  “Senator,” I said, “I will do so under two conditions: one, my mom gets an opportunity to volunteer for your campaign. And two, you visit my district.”

  “I have no problem with doing either of those,” he said.

  My mom was no longer working as a professor at South Carolina State, and I felt her volunteering would get her out of the house. Indeed, she became a steady volunteer for the Obama campaign, but the mystery for me was whether Obama would make good on his word about my other request. Would he really come to Bamberg County? I’d have to wait and see.

  Meanwhile, I was becoming increasingly acclimated to my new legislative position. As I’d walk up the fifty-two steps of the statehouse during those early days and months, my twenty-two-year-old self often would be thinking and psyching myself up: I’m about to shake some shit up at the capitol! This millennial is going to go in there and wobble the foundation of racism and bigotry and classism and inequality!

  In my heart, I was going to go in there and fix everything. That, of course, wasn’t necessarily going to be the case. In fact, I soon realized that my job was actually the definition of insanity—it was where I went to work trying every single day to do just that, but nothing changed.

  In a photograph taken of me on my first day of session, I’m looking up at the ceiling. The photograph made the Los Angeles Times, which wrote about my race making history. The moment that photograph was taken, I was thinking to myself, I can’t believe I’m here! But by January, I was looking around at members of South Carolina’s General Assembly and thinking, I can’t believe you’re here.

  It was shocking to me that some of those people had been in office for years upon years, but they were not in the mode of service. Some were more concerned about daily receptions than they were about governing. And there were receptions every night, every breakfast, and every lunch. There was always lots of food and drink. The receptions allowed citizens from various groups (for example, insurance, the Farm Bureau, associations for the blind, or the PTA) to spend time in Columbia with their elected officials, and it allowed us to spend time with our constituents.

  I felt I belonged in the House chambers. No matter how long my fellow members had been there, regardless of how old they were, I knew that we all represented the people. My constituents had sent me to the statehouse just like their constituents had sent them. Still, my being a young black Democrat in a deeply red state made it tough.

  And yet, being in the General Assembly was nothing less than amazing. As I look back over my eight years as an elected official, I realize I was lucky to have served among so many superstars. Since I was in South Carolina, they were mostly Republican stars, but stars nonetheless, like Jeff Duncan, now a US congressman; and Nikki Haley, who’d become the governor of South Carolina and later US ambassador to the United Nations. I served with Tim Scott, one of the few black US senators, and Mick Mulvaney, later a congressman who also served in President Donald Trump’s cabinet. Mick was in my freshman class of the newly elected state legislators.

  Since I was so young, a lot of pressure was on me. I knew everything I said would be scrutinized; I knew everyone wondered, Who is this young man from Denmark? What’s all the fuss about? What’s he going to say? But as I had done my entire life, I made sure that I was more prepared than the next person. Every morning I scoured the news, from periodicals to blogs, just to make sure I understood every important ongoing issue. I tried to attend committee meetings and even sat in on committees I wasn’t part of. These meetings helped me to measure the dynamics of the statehouse. I also wanted to be friends with people on both sides of the aisle so that I could become more effective in my very red state. I realized quickly that, alone, there are no superheroes. People have to learn basic math, which is to say, with 124 representatives, it was clear that my magic number was always 63 to pass a vote.

  I was fascinated to come to understand how political deals are made. To be an effective legislator, you need to know that deals are never struck inside the chambers; they are never agreed to in committee meetings. The receptions aren’t where the sausage is made either. Rather, we practically lived in Columbia’s Sheraton and Hilton hotels, where we’d sit down at the bar in the lobbies to talk. Frankly, that’s where everything got done—undercover, usually over a glass of vodka and soda, and where we were able to be human beings and not performance politicians.

  I’m talking about groups of maybe twenty elected officials. There, we learned about each other’s families, about spouses and kids. We laughed and joked and stayed up till 1 a.m. It didn’t matter if you were black or white, Democrat or Republican. We came together to at least try to get a few things done, which was hard for someone like me—young, black, and Democrat.

  Of course, I especially wanted to make sure I befriended the Black Caucus members. Some of them I knew growing up in the area and through my father, and others I got to know over time. I relied heavily on those veteran members of the caucus, and I ended up being somebody who challenged them as much as they challenged me to slow down and pay attention. It was a learning experience both ways. I think I added some value to their work by helping them understand the importance of social media and the relevance of the Black Lives Matter movement, but they definitely added a significant value to my eight years in office too. One Black Caucus member, Lonnie Hosey, was a mentor to me. A former Marine and Vietnam veteran, he had been wounded in action and earned a Purple Heart. You didn’t want to make Lonnie angry, but he was somebody you’d want to be in a foxhole with.

  Lonnie used to sit next to Seth Whipper, another Black Caucus member, whose mother had also served in the House. Both men unfortunately had lost their sons, and perhaps in some way I filled a void for them. When I was successful, they celebrated with me, but they were quick to admonish me when I made mistakes. Lonnie’s point was, “Boy, you need to slow down some. You can’t do everything.”

  But I wanted to fix all the world’s problems every single day. My first budget week was in 2007. We’d usually leave by 8 p.m. on the first day of budget week. The second day we’d get out at about 10 p.m., and then the third day, to get it all finished, we’d stay at the statehouse overnight. We’d go through amendment after amendment and then vote on the extension of the budget. Back then, the budget was about $6–7 billion. South Carolina at the time also had an AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP) waiting list. People on the list needed medications for HIV. South Carolina’s list had 303 people on it, which was one of the longest in the country, but it would cost the state only about $6 million to get rid of the whole list and just give everybody what they needed.

  The late Joe Neal was arguably the most compassionate m
ember of the General Assembly. He represented lower Richland and drove every Sunday for an hour and a half to Chester to preach. He launched the effort to pay off the ADAP list, and I went up to the podium to argue his case with him because Bamberg County also had high incidences of HIV and AIDS. We were asking our Republican colleagues to vote for what was relatively just a little bit of money—less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the total budget. Yet vote after vote after vote was a “no.”

  One of my Republican colleagues stood up and said in a most pejorative way, and this is vivid in my mind, “If you make your bed, you should have to lie in it.” I’ll never forget that. I was so frustrated that I ripped up my amendment, yelled “We’re killing people!,” and then left the podium. I exited the building, went through the parking garage, and sat down in my office. I could still hear what was going on in the chamber from my office, but I needed to be by myself. I was so upset that there was so little compassion in that legislative body.

  The African American House members, Lonnie, Seth, and Neal, were there to make sure I understood that the efforts we put forth were not wasted. We were chipping away at the glass ceiling. They told me I could not get frustrated at the lack of compassion in the hearts of other people; I just had to continue to speak for those who are voiceless. And lo and behold, they were right, because Kay Patterson, who served in the South Carolina State Senate and who wittily proclaimed himself to be chairman of the light-skinned Black Caucus, was able to get the money on the other side of the Senate to save those lives.

  As the months passed and the presidential primaries grew near, I traveled around the country for Senator Obama, mostly to colleges and universities. I also took on the role as co-chair of his steering committee in South Carolina. Many of our elected officials still were not yet supporting him; they were instead supporting Hillary Clinton, and some, John Edwards.