Obama maintained a skeleton campaign staff in South Carolina. Besides Anton Gunn, only one other employee covered the entire state. Dick Harpootlian and I were appointed “committee members.” Dick was the former chairman of South Carolina’s Democratic Party and the shrewdest attorney I know. He has what we call “fuck it money,” meaning he’s a self-made man who doesn’t have to answer to anyone any longer. The Washington Post once wrote a story about him headlined “Return of the King.”
But Dick’s also known for putting his foot in his mouth. Back in 1986, when he was running for a city council seat, he told a reporter, “I don’t want to buy the black vote, I just want to rent it for a day.” That quotation still comes up all the time, and I’ve always told Dick, who is a friend, that that comment was trash; but I also know Dick’s actions speak louder than his words. I respect his political instincts, which are second to none. For instance, Dick was one of the first big names in South Carolina, white or black, to publicly say that Obama could win the presidency, which brought others into the fold.
Still, if Obama was going to win the South Carolina primary, we had to overcome two issues. The first was that black folk, especially older black folk, were afraid that someone would kill him. After all, we have seen so many of our leaders murdered. The second was that black people feared that white Americans weren’t going to vote for Obama. They didn’t know like we knew that the Obama campaign was basically a raw duplicate of Deval Patrick’s successful campaign in Massachusetts several months earlier, when an amazing black candidate threaded the needle of his identity and weaved it to create a crossover appeal.
I called it casting your progressivism with a black idiom. You frame your progressivism through the lens of your own story. In other words, you don’t forget who you are or where you came from. Deval framed his progressive views through the lens of his poor childhood, and Obama told his through the lens of Chicago’s South Side.
Many people couldn’t envision how the campaign would play out on a national level or how we’d get over those two hurdles. In fact, we never even crossed those hurdles before the South Carolina primary. The first one—the fear of assassination—was no joke, and we were woefully unprepared. In fact, the first time Obama came to South Carolina as a presidential candidate to speak, at the Columbia Convention Center, we had fifteen thousand people in that auditorium—with no security. One white state senator, who represents a large black constituency in Manning and Clarendon counties, later pulled me aside in the senate building and told me that would never happen again. He personally called the chief of the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) and demanded that “this young man [Obama] gets security because he’s not going to be killed on our watch in South Carolina.”
Ultimately, Barack Obama did keep his word to me. Several months after receiving that call from him in April 2007, I got another one telling me that he was coming to my district and so I needed to help decide where we should have the event.
Michelle Obama had already visited Voorhees College. A hundred people showed up in Massachusetts Hall, right in the cul-de-sac of the college, which is a little more than a mile from my house. But there was no way we were going to fit Barack Obama in Denmark, or anywhere in Bamberg County, because we didn’t have a place to put him other than in an open field. And we weren’t planting Barack Obama in a field. So we settled on South Carolina State University in Orangeburg.
The day of the rally, January 22, 2008, I put on a suit and was feeling very confident. Way before we even pulled up on campus, I saw black people for miles and miles around. There were people from Maryland, Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia—it was the height of “Obama-mania.” Everyone wanted to touch the metaphorical hem of Obama’s garment.
I was surrounded by campus security and taken through the back door to the “green room,” otherwise known as the men’s basketball locker room, which smelled of socks and Gatorade. I walked in, and there was the comedian Chris Tucker and Scandal star Kerry Washington. Outside the room, I could hear the young crowd buzzing—well, it was more like pure ruckus. The Diana Ross version of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” was turned way up.
Rick Wade, one of Obama’s advisers, moved us upstairs to a little classroom where Chris Tucker, Kerry Washington, and I chatted. Then Wade peeked into the classroom and said, “I’m going to the Orangeburg County airport, I’ll be right back.”
I’d never heard of or seen anybody fly into Orangeburg County. I didn’t even know we had a runway.
But then Wade returned with the superstar singer Usher.
Things were moving pretty slowly. Time was ticking. We were starting late because Senator Obama had to fly in as well. At that moment, it was just me with Usher, Chris Tucker, and Kerry Washington in that classroom. Usher’s father had passed away about a week earlier. Although he didn’t have a strong relationship with his father at the time, the death was weighing heavy on his heart. Tucker, with his famous high-pitched twang, kept us upbeat.
Usher looked at me and said, “You’re the politician, man. I don’t do these political stunts. What should I go out there and say?”
I was twenty-three years old and thought of myself as witty and clever, so I said, “Usher, man, just go out there and sing, and say ‘Praise God!’ and ‘I love black women!’”
Soon enough we heard, “He’s here. It’s show time!”
Senator Obama glided in, shaking everybody’s hand. “Y’all ready? Let’s go! Let’s do this!”
The energy in the gym was insane. I heard what seemed to me the voice of God announce my name first: “Welcome to the stage Representative Bakari Sellers.”
I walked out onto near center court. All around the stage were steel barriers. People were screaming. The lights were blaring. There were people in all directions, so you had to talk while turning your body around to address everyone. There were international media representatives along the back wall. There were still people outside trying to get in, being placed, I was told, in overflow rooms. I had five minutes to say something useful.
I started by observing that the most important part of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech are the words “the fierce urgency of now.”
I’m not a person who quotes Dr. King a lot because I think that his words have become sanitized and in many ways compromised. People want to hold King up not just as a martyr, but as some cotton-candy political figure. They’ve managed to strip him of his revolutionary identity. I will always view Martin Luther King Jr. as a militant negro who had a 37 percent approval rating and who was taken from us because of hate. It drives me crazy when someone asks, “What would Dr. King think today if he hadn’t died?” That whitewashes what happened to him. He didn’t die in his sleep or have a heart attack or a stroke. He was assassinated, which makes for a different question entirely. Dr. King was taken from us in the most violent way possible.
I hadn’t really prepared my remarks for that day, but I had looked at King’s speech. And I thought, “Man, we even have little black boys and girls in church that know the rhythm and cadence of ‘I Have a Dream,’ but nobody reads the rest of the speech.” That’s a shame because that entire speech is dope.
Not many people know that Dr. King had delivered versions of part of that speech earlier. The words “I have a dream” weren’t even in the text that he planned to read that day during the March on Washington. But King was such a good pastor that at that moment, on the National Mall, on the steps on the Lincoln Memorial, he knew he wasn’t taking the people to where they needed to be. Great speakers like King, and Barack Obama and many pastors in the South, feel when their audience is fully where they need to be. In my own way too, every time I give a speech, I want to move the audience someplace they were not when they sat down.
Back in 1963, it wasn’t until the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson hollered out to her good friend, “Tell them about the dream, Martin!” that his words soared into history. And Dr. King didn’
t just pull those words from his ass but from what he already knew. In June of that year, he had given a speech about “a dream” before 130,000 people at Detroit’s Walk to Freedom. Indeed, now was “the time to make real the promises of democracy.” He went out on a task-torial riff in Washington, DC.
So maybe that’s why on stage, with Barack Obama in the wings, I felt Dr. King’s words, “the fierce urgency of now,” to be fitting. I was talking to young people in the audience, but I was also talking to some black folk from my district. I wasn’t sure they knew how close we could be to having a black president and how urgent it was because all the polls had been saying that Hillary Clinton was going to steamroll us. For my purposes, I wanted people to understand we could create a ripple effect for the rest of the country to see.
Honestly, I didn’t fully understand the magnitude of the moment I was in. When I turned around and introduced Chris Tucker, the crowd got louder. After five minutes, he introduced Kerry Washington. It was January and cold outside, but I was close to breaking out in a sweat because the lights were beaming down on us. Kerry Washington spoke and then introduced Usher. The women in the room swooned. It was pandemonium.
The first words that came out of Usher’s mouth were, “You know, I want to first thank God and give a shout out to all the beautiful black women out there.”
Usher, one of the biggest stars in the world, had taken my advice! We looked at each other and shared an inner chuckle.
By the time Obama walked out on the stage, the rails and bleachers were literally shaking. We were supposed to stand behind him while he spoke, at least those were the staging instructions. But people weren’t focused. They were yelling out “Usher!” or “Chris!” or “Kerry!” There was too much star power on that stage.
The candidate noticed it, looked at us, and said, “Why don’t y’all go to the back and come back out when I get done.” But first he took a photo with all of us before we left the stage. “Come on,” he said, “let’s take this shot.”
In that photo, Chris Tucker is to my left and the future forty-fourth president of the United States is to my right. To his right is Kerry Washington, and to her right is Usher Raymond, with his black power fist held high. Everybody was in the moment.
So many emotions were running through me when that picture was taken. Little did I know that it would go viral, that it would be published in US Weekly and still be a mural today at the South Carolina State Student Center.
When Barack Obama came out on stage that day, he said, “I have to thank Representative Bakari Sellers. He’s been there for me from the start. He’s an up-and-comer. He’s being talked about not only here, but he’s talked about around the country.”
He gave me the biggest endorsement of my life.
Barack Obama won that South Carolina Democratic primary, but he also won the Iowa caucuses, which answered the second question black folk worried about: Would white people vote for him? It was a dream come true.
The black American poet Langston Hughes, in his famous poem “Harlem,” posed an important question: “What happens to a dream deferred?” It becomes a “heavy load,” or at other times perhaps “it explodes.” If you’re black in America you’ve recited that poem as a child. It inspired both Martin Luther King Jr. and Barack Obama. Its question “Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?” inspired the play A Raisin in the Sun, which was named the best play of 1959. And it inspired me when I decided at a very young age to run for office, refusing to believe I couldn’t help people in my hometown just because I was young. However, I believe that to make a dream come true, one must be organized and steadfast, like Dr. King and all those marchers and demonstrators. To be a successful leader, you must dream and envision the future but be practical enough to plan and strategize to make that future come true.
Being onstage with Barack Obama was a special moment because I was twenty-three and had fulfilled a dream. I was a leader. It was a dream I had started working on when I was seventeen, though I had been preparing for it since I was a little boy raised to have a purpose in life.
If I had waited to run for office, like some people told me to do, I wouldn’t have been wrapping up my first term in the South Carolina House of Representatives onstage with the future president of the United States. And it was all happening at South Carolina State University. I had gone to elementary and middle school at Felton Laboratory School, which was right across the street; for most of my life I had played in the gym I was now standing in. I was nineteen miles away from where I had told my parents that I was going to run for office. And I was three hundred yards away from where my father had been shot by white law enforcement officers during the Orangeburg Massacre.
VII
Risk Taking
The last time an African American was elected to a statewide political office in South Carolina was back in 1876. Obviously, my state needed a change, which is why in 2014 I took a huge political risk: I decided to give up my seat in the state House of Representatives and run for lieutenant governor.
I was twenty-nine years old, and everybody asked me the same thing: Do you really think you can win? The answer was always—Yes!
I spent my twenties serving in the South Carolina General Assembly. I loved it, but I began to feel like I was growing stagnant. Running for statewide office gave me an opportunity to make history, and because of state constitutional changes, it would be the last time a candidate for lieutenant governor could run alone, on his or her own merits, rather than tied to a gubernatorial ticket.
But there was a deeper reason I wanted to run for that office. The roof of the cafeteria of Denmark-Olar Elementary School, which is just more than a mile from where I grew up, collapsed in 2010, without any news coverage, as if no one cared. The youngest of the school’s students attend classes in trailers. When it rains, the children, all African American, trek through mud to get to their classrooms.
There’s a reason why a collapsed school roof in the poor rural South received no press: because it’s typical. On a statewide platform, I knew I could speak about the “Corridor of Shame,” where thousands of rural children across the South attend schools that are dilapidated and falling apart. I’m a product of the proverb “it takes a village to raise a child,” but all around me I was seeing the village crumbling.
And it wasn’t just the schools; we had other issues that needed attention. Hospitals were still closed, especially in communities that needed them the most. People were traveling five hours a day for low-paying jobs, and the most vulnerable were drinking water unfit for human consumption.
Henry McMaster, my opponent, had been in political or appointed office since 1984. He had worked for President Ronald Reagan as his US attorney in South Carolina. He ran an unsuccessful bid for the Senate back in 1986 but ultimately became the state’s Republican Party chairman and also the attorney general for the state. He was obviously a big deal, but we were a clear contrast. I believed I represented hope and the future, and he stood for the past.
One of the first things Jill Fletcher, my fundraiser, and I did was to visit Congressman Clyburn at his large district office at the intersection of Lady and Sumter streets in Columbia. I was excited to talk to the congressman about my ambition and wanted to get his support. Besides, he was one of the reasons I had entered politics in the first place.
At twenty-nine, I was still too young for some people, but I had a track record. I had built a school in Bamberg County and a library in Denmark, and I had brought a door company to my hometown. But there was so much more to do. We needed to fix South Carolina’s schools, bring clean water to poor rural communities in the state, and help uproot politicians who were keeping our state stuck in the past. Unlike when I started to run my first election, I didn’t feel the need to get support from local luminaries; I hoped I had earned their support by now. We were running to represent 4.6 million South Carolinians, not only the nearly 40,000 people I served in the House. This was a different type of race.
Still, I wanted Congressman Clyburn’s support. When we met, though, he snickered and said, “If anybody could win statewide, don’t you think I would have already done it?”
I was so taken aback that I actually gasped. The comment seemed rude, but I understood his point. For a very long time, my former employer had been a lone wolf, the only Democratic US congressman in South Carolina. He had had an unsuccessful run statewide, and so he understood the hardships any Democrat, and a black Democrat at that, was going to face.
Many people were not gung-ho and supportive. Like before, they thought I was too young and too inexperienced. But we didn’t build the energy that surrounded the campaign by focusing top-down, or on political luminaries. Instead, we sparked excitement with millennials and people from ages eighteen to forty-five who didn’t see me as young and inexperienced but seasoned and capable. We visited business leaders, church folk, and wide nets of influencers.
* * *
I chose Isaac “Ike” Williams Jr. as my campaign manager. He’s also one of my closest friends: I often say we’ve known each other since before we were born because our fathers were in the civil rights movement together. Ike was my aide at the statehouse, charged with serving the day-to-day needs of my constituents. I was juggling law school, my legislative duties, and commuting between Denmark, Columbia, and Charlotte in North Carolina to see Ellen Rucker, my fiancée and future wife, so Ike was my liaison on many fronts. He was also a political consultant, with many successes under his belt. He had been the field director for the mayor of Columbia and later became Bernie Sanders’s South Carolina political director.
But back in 2013, I asked him, “What do you think about me running for lieutenant governor?”
My Vanishing Country Page 10