The arc of Cleveland Sellers Jr.’s life has taken him from rural South Carolina to the Ivy League, through the civil rights movement into the first-ever campus shooting in the United States, to exile in Greensboro, N.C., and academia in Columbia then back home to the place where it all started — Denmark, S.C.

 

Along the way, two values have informed every action: education and service. From the beginning, Sellers has advanced the simple idea that through the acquisition of knowledge and an understanding of cultural heritage, Blacks can become at once fully enfranchised and wholly unique, and Americans generally can leave the days of discrimination and injustice behind them once and for all.

 

Sellers, born and raised in Denmark, became a leader in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as a young man, working side by side with John Lewis and Stokely Carmichael. When, in 1968, he was promoting the idea of starting a Black studies program at South Carolina State College, he became embroiled in the fiasco now known as the Orangeburg Massacre. Many years later, he would teach Black history, become director of the African-American Studies Program at the University of South Carolina and then assume the presidency of the historically Black Voorhees College in his hometown.

 

Black studies is part of the effort to make Black history available, to overcome the efforts to portray that history as secondary, he says.

 

“African-American history is American history. There is no way to separate the two,” Sellers says. It is essential to know as much as possible of this history, for we cannot appreciate current circumstances — the election of Barack Obama, for example — without understanding the accomplishments and sacrifices of the past, he says.