Cleveland Sellers

Cleveland "Cleve" Sellers Jr. (born November 8, 1944) is an American educator and civil rights activist.

During the Civil Rights Movement, Sellers helped lead the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

During his boyhood, Sellers joined the Boy Scouts of America and attended the 1960 National Scout jamboree in Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Sellers was presented with a historically correct Eagle Scout medal that would have been awarded in the 1960s at a special Eagle Scout Court of Honor at the 2010 Centennial National Scout Jamboree.

The Sellers family was religious and joined St. Philip's Episcopal Church where Cleveland became enthralled with the sermons and brotherhood he was surrounded by.

The murder of Emmett Till when Sellers was only ten years old, shook him deeply.

He said "I couldn't see a difference between the two of us."

Between the murder of Till and a week-long summer retreat with church leaders who discussed racial inequalities in America, Sellers was mobilized about civil rights.

Also propelled by the Greensboro sit-ins, Sellers quickly became dedicated to student-led protesting.

In 1960, in response to the Greensboro sit-ins, Sellers organized a sit-in protest at a Denmark, South Carolina lunch counter.

At the age of 15, he was active for the first time with the Civil Rights Movement.

After the 1960 protest, Sellers' father had forbidden his son's jeopardizing himself by becoming an activist.

Nevertheless, Sellers became involved with the Nonviolent Action Group (NAG) where he met Stokely Carmichael.

Carmichael deeply inspired Sellers as he was like-minded and a prominent face of the movement on campus.

Carmichael's house became NAG headquarters, where Malcolm X himself frequented and advocated to students about the idea of black nationalism, which often criticized MLK's entirely peaceful and inclusive stance.

Although some were reluctant, it was an interesting concept.

Right before the March on Washington, Bayard Rustin, head coordinator of the movement, contacted NAG asking them to supply what they could to the march.

Sellers and others supplied signs and food during the march.

As Sellers walked through the masses at the march, he could hear Malcolm X's message in his ear.

The SNCC was founded in 1960 by students.

He was very spiritually disciplined and took an "oath of poverty" after joining, forsaking education, family and pleasures of student life to focus on the movement.

He was immediately assigned to Holly Springs, Mississippi, to coordinate voting registration and advocate for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

He and his colleagues were met with intense racism while in Mississippi.

When they returned home, they felt beat down and as though nothing had been accomplished.

So, when Sellers was elected program director of the SNCC the next year, he quickly took action to revise the goals of the organization.

Sellers thought the philosophical tactics of the SNCC weren't working, and he instead wanted to implement extremely focused and achievable goals for the group.

He attended Voorhees from ninth through 12th grades, graduating in 1962.

In 1962 Sellers enrolled in Howard University.

In 1964, Sellers became involved with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

He was the only person convicted and jailed for events at the Orangeburg Massacre, a 1968 civil rights protest in which three students were killed by state troopers.

Sellers' conviction and the acquittal of the other nine defendants was believed to be motivated by racism, and Sellers received a full pardon 25 years after the incident.

Sellers is the former Director of the African American Studies Program at the University of South Carolina.

Although Sellers completed the requirements necessary to become an Eagle Scout, "his paperwork was lost" and he was not formally recognized with the honor until December 3, 2007, at 64 years of age, more than four decades after it was earned.

He served as president of Voorhees College, a historically black college in South Carolina, from 2008 to 2015.

Sellers was born in Denmark, South Carolina, to Cleveland Sellers (Sr.) and Pauline Sellers.

Denmark was a town of mostly black residents, so much so, that as a child, Sellers was often blind to the privilege of whites.

He said, "as far as I was concerned, white people didn't constitute a threat or deterrent to anything I wanted to be or accomplish."

He began attending the Voorhees School when he was three and served as its mascot.

Growing up, Sellers had a great relationship with his parents, especially his mother.

He admired her care for the community and said that he grew up "under her wing."