Oral History/Interview
Cleveland Sellers, SNCC, 2013

Unedited AI-Generated Transcript

Originally published by Southern Oral History Program. From the collection at University of Chapel Hill North Carolina. Documenting the American South, University Library, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (see citation, for details).

Tape #1 Audio Recording  Tape #2 Audio Recording

Tape #1

Interviewer ~ Evan Faulkenbury:

Okay, today is March 18th, 2013. I'm here in Denmark, South Carolina. This is an interview with Dr. Cleveland Sellers Jr. And my name is Evan Falcon Berry, and we're going to begin. So Dr. Sellers first question, just to establish your biographical information, can you describe place of birth, date of birth parents and growing up here?

Cleveland Sellers:

Yes. I was born November 8th, 1944. I was born during the time of the Second World War and my father was in combat when I was born. My father is a native of Denmark, South Carolina. His name is Cleveland L Sellers, and I am a junior. My mother was from Abyville, South Carolina. Her name was Pauline Taggar Sellers, and she was an educator, he was a entrepreneur. He grew up in the Booker d Washington tradition, and so we'll talk about that as we go along. I grew up in Denmark, South Carolina, and one of the things that we feature here at the college is the fact that at the age of three, my mother made me a football outfit and got a helmet from somewhere and I became a mascot for ESE at that particular time. So the theme around here is from mascot to president, so it's like a circle coming back together with my being back here at Forhe at this time.

The period of time that I grew up was the period of time of racial segregation. I went to a segregated school. The community was segregated during my entire growing up in South Carolina. I'm in a rural part of South Carolina, a part of what was referred to early on as the black Belt, which means it is the farmland and usually the areas where plantations once existed, where there would be more African-Americans than whites in those areas when at the turn of the century you go from a kind of rural agricultural area to an industrial area, the shift was for people to move to cities and that kind of thing. And so there was a migration in South Carolina that took a lot of folk out of South Carolina, African-Americans too, and the ones who were left were the ones who wanted to stay and see if they could still crank out a living using their skills as either entrepreneurs, farmers, planters, or something along those lines.

So in these areas, blacks own a lot of land and many of 'em were farmers and they were self-sufficient, even if it was marginal in terms of raising a lot of extra resources. But they were able to survive during this particular period of time. I had the opportunity of going to school in Denmark, and so I went to Voorhees from kindergarten all the way through high school. Voorhees was founded in 1897 by a woman named Elizabeth Evelyn Wright, who was a prodigy of Book t Washington. So Voorhees was designed structurally and administratively as Booker t Washington was. And Booker t Washington encouraged all of his students who had an education background to go out and found educational institutions for African-Americans during that particular period of time, thought that that was very important. And we also note that there was always that struggle between the industrial education of Book t Washington and the universal education of Du Bois.

But we find that for Es, that discussion was held and then people said to use the best of both worlds. So he started out as an industrial educational institution, which means that it had a farm and so it had an agricultural side and all that kind of thing. When Elizabeth Evelyn Wright came to Denmark to found her school, she was 23 years old in 1897 when she found the school, and she really worked very hard to get the students in. I think she started out with about seven, eight. And in a year time she had expanded that to in the hundreds. People found out that that was an opportunity to be educated. They understood the importance of education, which was always a bedrock issue in the African-American community, even when there were others who saw that as being a crime against humanity to teach and to educate an African- American, she sought out to find donors and people who could contribute to the school.

Her first area was churches in the area, and so she was able to get some monies from that, but she ended up going north and raising monies for a place to actually have some land to build some buildings and house the students and build classroom spaces and that kind of thing. And she did do that, and she was lucky enough to find a philanthropist and industrialists out of New Jersey by the name of wares, and he was able to send her enough money, which is what she requested to buy, 450 acres of property, which is where the campus is now. And she got those funds. But being the wise man that he was vor, he insisted on sending her some extra money so that she could not only buy the land, but she would have some money for some maybe a building or some books or something.

And so he did send her some extra monies and that's what we were able to get going at that point. Voor, he then transitioned to the high school for this area. The state did not, they chose not to bill a black high school, a high school for blacks in Denmark. And so they actually paid VOR hisa tuition for all the students in this area to go to school here. And segregate schools in South Carolina stayed around to about the early seventies before there was school desegregation, even though that was brown versus board in 1954. But there was resistance to desegregation and certainly desegregation of schools across the south. We were able to, with brown versus board, eliminate the J segregation, but we couldn't get the kind of social formations and institutions that persisted on continuing segregation in another form that would be the defacto segregation.

So I grew up in Denmark, had a fairly large African-American community, and you had a lot of businesses operated by African-Americans in the areas, cleaners and little grocery stores. And my father owned a little cafe kind of restaurant that he had before he went into the service, had somebody run it for him while he was in the service, and then he came back and took that over again. And he started from there with the idea of building housing for African-Americans and allowing them to have what we would call back then substantial houses. They were not the wood frame houses, they were blocked houses and had indoor restrooms and that kind of thing. So that's where he got started with kind of his craft. And then he ran a taxi DeCalb service and he ran a restaurant. And so a combination of those kinds factors in the small town of Denmark, South Carolina.

My mother was a graduate of South Carolina State, and she also worked a period of time in the school systems and she then went to Hampton University. That was the institution that developed school teachers for the other colleges and universities and schools across the south that were opening up. And so she did go to Hampton. That was the tradition of African-Americans at that time who were educated and had an undergraduate degree to go to Hampton. So she went to Hampton and then she came back and she worked at for 20 years as a dietician. And they, new homemaker instructor economics focus and English were her areas. And she then in I guess about 1954, she went from Voorhees over to Denmark, South Carolina Area Trade School, which was a trade technical school for blacks, the only one in South Carolina. And she moved over there. So she was kind of like the educator.

And on the side, she used to work with young girls in preparation and home economics kinds of talents and sewing and just how to dress and mannerisms, behavior, that kind of thing. So my father was on the other side with a lot of different kinds of industrial, not, I guess you would call them entrepreneurial kind of events. He raised animals, pigs to sell and cows and horses, and we did all of that. I mean, he was just a jack of all trades. He would just continually in motion, he would have a series of things he would have to do every day and he would do all those things and then get back to cooking in the restaurant and people would call in for cab service and he would have somebody else come in and stand in. He'd go out and do the cab thing and tell him when he could come, and then that's what he would do.

So most of my growing up was in South Carolina. And I think that one of the things that helped me tremendously was that I had an opportunity to not only start out in a SACS accredited elementary and high school, but then I came to go to high school on the campus here at, I actually went to high school on this campus and I was, during a time that was a rich time for an exciting time for things that were going on across the world with the late 1950s with the independence of African nations. We had African students of where he's had African students on campus. So it was an exciting time. And then when the sit-ins started in North Carolina, I was a sophomore, rising sophomore, and the students were involved. And three weeks after the February 1st sit-ins in Greensboro, the sit-ins actually came to Denmark. I never thought at that point that I would be able to reach out and touch the rest of the world, but the institution being here afforded me that opportunity. So I think I had a tendency to develop social consciousness at a much earlier age when we saw the Jet Magazine and my home was full of the black press, the Pittsburgh Gloria, the Baltimore Afro, the German guide out of Norfolk, Virginia and

Jet Magazine in Ebony. So those were standard bearers. And when the Jet magazine comes with the picture of Emmett Till on, I like some of the other students would take that kind of thing to school and say, well, what is going on here? And we had had to address those kinds of issues and we could address those kinds of issues and discuss those kinds of issues in school.

So I think that the Emmett Till, the image of the bloated body and all that, and Emmett Till was when this happened in 1956, was a couple years older than I was, but I could relate to Emmett Till he was a 13-year-old boy. You saw that as being a person who is eight to 13 kind of in the same category. And so the teachers tried to put in context for us what had transpired and how we plan to move forward and make a lot of that stuff acceptable. So I think at that point, we all knew that we were going to be the generation that corrected the atrocities and the injustice that was meted out for Emmett Hill, not just the murder, but the fact that they let the people go and kind of gave 'em immunity to go ahead on and do that kind of thing and try to set an example.

And that ours was not about getting even, it was about changing the system so that it actually lived up to the principles and the constitution that the founding fathers had put on the US Constitution, the principles and the Constitution itself. And so that's what we had. We had that challenge out there. It was just a question of where do we find the kind of tactic that began to push back on that? And it was the students at a and t who actually implemented the first part of that tactic. I think the students at Fisk and Tennessee State and American Baptist College, Baptist Seminary out in Nashville was the group that was going to go first, but they ran into Christmas, they postponed, and by the time they got back, students at a NT had already stepped on out there and moved forward with that.

So that's how I think the consciousness actually comes into the picture and how I evolved. I was in a very nurturing community and because my mother was an educator, my father, he had graduated from high school and had gone into the service that meant that his educational level was higher than many others. And so they just tried to take advantage of that. But it was a community that insisted on us doing well. It did not allow us to sit down. And it almost reminds me the mother to son poem by Paul Lawrence Dunbar, which essentially encourage her son not to ever stop climbing, that she had been climbing all her life, and life is not a crystal stare, as she said. It just doesn't go up up. There's some landings that you have to go down and some changes in your plans, but you always have to get back up and going up the ladder. So that's what the community always expected for us, and I was expected to do well, and they prepared us as best they could. And as I'm matriculated on through college, I found out that I was prepared even better than I had thought. So I was competitive with other students every time I went somewhere.

But the community is always something that you have to talk about because that's where we got our nourishing nurturing that we felt as a part of the community. And at the point of segregation, the African-American community was not stratified. So you could have a preacher living next to the lone policeman who was living next to the drunk, who's living next to the whoever it might be on down the street, the person who didn't work and didn't want to work.

So it was a mixed, and so you got the best of possibilities when you look for leadership in that community. And you had to fight over issues that were usually somebody who was non-descriptive, who was considered to be the race leader. And when any of those issues of race came up, they would come in and kind of sit down and try to figure out what the community was going to do. And the reason why that person was nondescript was because they didn't want the status quo to know who that person was. And so they protected him by not ever identifying him. And so he would go around and look and see and talk about different kinds of things when the Klan was coming, how are we going to prepare

Faulkenbury:

Through that grapevine?

Sellers:

Oh yeah, it was the word of mouth, the kind of grapevine that existed. And it had to be kind of undercover because anytime somebody was found out to be actually organizing and promoting a break of segregation and those kinds of things, securing the right to vote or pushing on the front with the school desegregation, something bad would happen. They lose their jobs, their houses would be fired on. There would be a cross burned in their yard. They would lose credit at the grocery store

Sellers:

Off of his credit list. And so people had to go through hard times. So there was a secure communication channel and network during that particular period of time. But I want to indicate to you what we had to transition through during this period of time. And just in terms of the educational system and how it reinforced all the stereotypes about African-Americans and our teachers were the navigators and they, in spite of whatever weaknesses they may have had or whatever deficiencies they may have, they were able to get us to the other side and pass some things that were horrendous and could have stopped us from having any sense of hope at that time. I'll get you a book out that I have.

Faulkenbury:

Thank

Sellers:

You. Set up right here and we can do some of that.

Faulkenbury:

Great.

Sellers:

But the book that I'm making reference to is the New Sims History of South Carolina, the Centennial edition 19 18 40 to 1940 by Mary C. Sims Aliant.

Faulkenbury:

When was it published?

Sellers:

It was published in 1940, and this was the book that I used as a civics book in my ninth grade civics class.

Now, the interesting part about this book is if you look at it, you can see that it's probably no different from the way it was when I got it and I'm in school in the 1950s. So what happens is is that for the white schools, they would buy new books when those new books became old and battered and whatever, they would be passed to the black school. And so this is what we have. And I just thought that it was interesting. A couple of years ago, I went back through it and I wanted to see how they made references to this particular period of time.

And so I got two sections here One, all of it deals with the period of reconstruction. And on page 265, they're telling the young students high school age and middle school age the greatest problem. That's highest title. The sudden freeing of the Negro would've brought serious problems even without the evil influence of carpetbaggers, there were more Negroes than whites in the state. The Negroes were uneducated that had no knowledge of government. They did not know how to make a living without the supervision of the white man. They were so accustomed to being taken care of that they had no idea how to behave under freedom. They stole cattle and chickens and hogs burned bonds and stables. They were not willing to work. They were like children playing hooky. The moment the teacher, your back was turned, there were so many more Negroes than whites that they would have been in control if they had been allowed to vote. They had never, they had nearly ruined the state during the years they voted, the whites were determined that this should not happen again. Regulations were made which prevented the Negro from voting. And to this day, South Carolina has a white man's government. The welfare two races, living in one small state is a problem you will have to face when you become citizens.

Faulkenbury:

And this was, you read this in ninth grade or you used this book in ninth grade?

Sellers:

Yes, yes. Then the other one is Fighting Fire with fire. This one is even interesting, more interesting.

Faulkenbury:

Okay, let's hear it

Sellers:

With the arming of the Negro, and they're talking about the militias that were actually put in during construction. Oh, during construction, during reconstruction, crimes increase greatly. Houses were burned, women were insulted on the streets. White men were arrested on send excuses, murderers and burglaries were frequent faced with these terrible conditions. South Carolinians banded together and formed the Ku Klux Klan. Whenever the Negro would trouble the Ku Klux Klan dressed in long white robes and caps and mounted on fast horses gathered through the darkness, frighting the superstitious blocks into submission. So that's the description.

What the teachers had to do was work us through that so we could actually do that kind of thing. How did they

Faulkenbury:

Do that?

Sellers:

They just sat in there and said that this isn't true. But you have to understand that that's what the status quo says about you.

So there are some discipline you have to have that you have to, in spite of getting hit with that kind of thing, you had to endure it. You had to just, I mean, you'd have to work hard. My father used to say, a lot of times you would have to recognize and know that you had to work twice as hard to get half as much. And he said, now don't think that there's something that you have done or that you are to make that happen. That's just the system that we live in. And he said, but you still have to work hard. You can't quit. You can't give up, but that you'll get half as much and you'll be working twice as hard as everybody else. So that was the orientation that was growing up. Now the irony here, if there is an irony, is that for Denmark, I was not able to go into a white church until I was 50 years old. Wow. 50. So I was born here. We went through segregation. Some things changed in the 1960s, but it was probably the late eighties that I got to go. Now I imagine they were toying around and letting somebody come in there periodically.

But during the time when the students at Vorhees went downtown in February of 1960, they also went to the white church and were turned down at the white church. So you couldn't miss this fledging movement coming into its own in the late fifties and the early sixties. And so that's how I get involved in movement kinds of activities. Now, I think I've given you enough here on your background and growing up and the kind of context in which that actually occurs.

Faulkenbury:

Absolutely. Lemme just ask one question from that, because from what you've just said, and then also from reading your autobiography, you mentioned, or you discuss a lot of this too. So can you just discuss a little bit more about the ways in which people in the African-American community here in Denmark had that had to, they lived with this constant white oppression all around

And so can you discuss the ways in which they tried to or did in fact negotiate that kind of white supremacy that was so embedded in the culture and how they taught children to resist it and to understand

Sellers:

It? What they did initially was try to protect their children from that. So if you were to go outside of your community, there would be some elements that would not be there. So inside the community, there were institutions and there were activities that were parallel institutions and activities that went on. So it wasn't anything missing in the community. There were parks and you made parks, there was school and you made school. There were activities that the schools were involved in, and you continued to do those kinds of things. So it was segregated, but they would always caution you about crossing over that divide. But the community was very much in a protective mode, the adult community of that kind of, and their thing was that if we can get you to the point where you can go on the college or get education or go into the armed services that we have given you a foundation, a good foundation, we've given you as best education, the best education that we possibly could come up with.

And we have told you about being a strong principal kind of individual. And so where that didn't work on every single individual, it worked on the great majority. When I came out of high school, I would imagine that about 70% of the students in my graduating class went off to some kind of college. They might've gone to a technical college or something like that, but everybody went. And then I'm saying about over 70%, but the others went into the military with the idea that they were going to generate some monies through the GI bills, which had already been in place. And then they were going to go to school after they finished the military service, and a large number of 'em did that. So we are talking about somewhere in the neighborhood of a, probably about 90, 96% went on through some kind of educational system that was a part of the philosophy. And like I said, Booker t Washington was all around, so you couldn't miss that idea. Use your hands, learn to use your hands. You had to have a skill. You had to build family, you had to build community, there had to be principals guiding principles that you went. You had to have the faith. All those things were very much intact and there, and it was scheduled so that you didn't miss anything. And if you're not involved and then taken out, you really don't miss anything. You don't know what it is that's on the other side, and you just learn to make do.

So we had activities that would elevate you every year at the end of the academic year, we used to have on May 1st mayday all kinds of activities. All the parents would come and get them involved, and how well we have done this academic year and the schools would allow all students to come. We had some students who came and they didn't have the ability to do all the schoolwork, but there would always be something for them to do. They were integrated into that process. So they were socialized so that they would be able to have the ability to move on, even though they had some issues with dialectical. The thing where you see the writing upside down, it's electric. I'm not sure whatever it is, it is a term for that

Faulkenbury:

Or dyslexia.

Sellers:

Dia dyslexia,

Faulkenbury:

Yes.

Sellers:

Okay. And so all of the kids had an opportunity to come if some were polio or whatever it is, they brought 'em in, they were mainline. And so students had an opportunity to develop some socialized skills that went through a socializing process that gave them the ability to always be considerate of your neighbor. And you bring those kind of folks in. I remember one time we had a young man who had polio in, and he was in a wheelchair for a while, and then he was on crutches for a while, and he was always friends with the guys that played basketball and baseball, all the athletes. And I'm telling you, he would be at every game. They made sure he had a way to get wherever it is they were going. He was one of the boys. And that's the kind of attitude I think, that really shaped you and round you off.

And anytime there was any serious affront to a student or a dangerous situation, the seniors would always move out and say, we need to take care of this. For an example, when the Klan was going to be coming in to March down the street or be on Main Street and all that, people say, you don't go, let's set up something at a church. And we'd keep the kids over there. They'll never know that this kind of thing went on downtown. The people who were downtown were usually adults who would be down there just to make sure that they could tell where people were and all that kind of stuff. And during that time, some of the people who would come would the hoods on. So you couldn't, wasn't supposed to be able to identify 'em, but people knew who they were, so they just made sure that they were there and that was taken care of. So you learn how to negotiate by just learning that life is not going to be easy, life is going to be tough. And you pass on those little, I guess, sayings about the difficulties, the mother, the child that I'm talking about, and having to pull yourself up. You can always keep pulling yourself up, keep going. It gets tiring. Sometimes it gets slow, but you still have to continue to move up and move along

And get yourself out of that situation. And there was still a degree of hope and faith, and there was belief in the Constitution belief that with the Brown vs board, there was some hope in the courts and you just had to kind of work through that. Now, there was that whole system at that point, and the strategy of the movement was legalism. And that's what the young people came in contact with and said, that legal thing is fine. But if you go back to Brown versus Board of Education, Charles Hamilton Houston, who was the first to assemble the NAACP attorneys and get at Howard, at Howard University and that whole thing, he was around in South Carolina in 1934

Talking about the inequity in the schools and the inequity in the teacher's pay and the facilities, all of that kind of stuff. So he began then, but this is 1934, the Dead Gone case didn't get effective until after he was dead. He died in 1950 and 20 years after he had started out laying the groundwork, he said that it was going to have to create some legal precedents that you would be able to take to Supreme Court and actually get it going. And it took that long period of time. They started out in 1934 working on some of those cases, Missouri, and they had a couple other cases that they worked on early on about. And they started with higher education, didn't work their way down because they didn't want the groundswell of people to say, oh, they're trying to do some harm to our children. They didn't want to get to that one until they got some of the presidents in place. So there was an overall strategy, but my generation said, we don't want to wait. And so we want some change. We want change in tactics. We want change in the leadership. We want to be able to say what we want and work to get that.

And that was a change shift in attitude. And when you're talk about the leadership, you're talking about pretty much black male leadership will push that onto the side. And that's what we were saying on the cutting edge coming in, that we, there's no reason why we have to wait all this time. So we are going to cut to the chase.

Faulkenbury:

So in 1960, when the sit-ins begin in Greensboro, you quickly become a leader here in Denmark for putting in Denmark's own kind of sit-in. So how did you become a leader and how did you push the sit-in movement

Sellers:

Here? I was always very conscious of what was going on in the country. I was able to follow through the black press coming in every day. And they told me about SCLC and the formation of SCLC. They told me about some other lynchings in Mississippi after Emmett Till that were at least three, that two that I remember very vividly, but they were adults. But it kind of painted a picture of Mississippi where I understood what that was. It painted a picture of South Carolina. It talked about the attorneys, Thurgood Marshall and what was going on there. Talked about the NAACP and their F is at desegregation. It told me about Little Rock Central. It told me about all those things. So it wasn't like all of a sudden something hits me. I am rolling along with that and trying to, in the back of our minds, and I'm talking, I'm not just talking about me. I'm talking about many of those who were peers and coworkers and freedom fighters in their own sense that we were working on a place for us to enter. And when the students in Greensboro came up with something that everybody can understand and understand how it applied pressure

That we knew that it wasn't becoming a leader, it was becoming an organized and a better organizer. So I helped put the guys together that were going to go down, but since you didn't know what the consequences of the unintended consequences were going to be, they wouldn't let high school students participate. And they wouldn't let women participate. And so they said, well, we don't know, so we'll go down. And then they worked it out with the president, and the president was supposed to have the school provide a bus about three miles downtown. And at the last minute, some of the board of trustees who were white, who didn't want them to come downstairs said, don't give 'em a bus. So they had to start out here and they had to walk all the way downtown, but just think of that image because the news is sit-ins in Columbia Rock Hill, and they were just every two or three days, and the national press was getting hot on it and see these six, seven guys walking down single file all the way down, and they were going real slow and they were all dressed up.

So the image caught, and it created a certain pride in the African-American community that this was actually going on. So after that was over, we had some other kinds of struggles here on the campus about what would be the consequences of those individuals taking this kind of action and trying to get the administration to be lenient about putting them out of school and that kind of thing. And some of 'em, 'em remained. Some of 'em were put out, it varied. And I ran for and became student government leader of the high school and the college. They had their own student government leader, but they put it together. And that would mean that I would be the under. So you have a student government president, and then you'd have me there next. But I ran for election and I beat out some of my very dear and close friends, and that's how you get into those kind of positions.

And then after 60, I did go up to Rock Hill, and that's where I didn't meet 'em, but I heard a lot about 'em because they were in prison. That's why we were going up there. And I was able to get three cars, maybe 15, 16 kids from here to go up there with me. And I got the principal's car, and I got my mother's car, and I got the minister's car, the chaplain on campus, and we got drivers for each one. They said, just fill the cars up. Y'all go up, be careful and come by. And that's what we did. So we began to provide that kind of support and network and tie in and all that stuff. So we won a roll. And that was during the time when they did jail, no bail up in Rock Hill. And that was Ruby Darris and Diane and Charles'. Charles Jones. Charles Jones, yeah. And there was somebody else, it might've been one of the freedom singers. There was somebody else that was there. I can't remember who it is now. And it could have been the chairman of SNCC, but I don't think he was there. Charles, oh my goodness, I'll think of their names in a minute or two. I know just like brothers and sisters. But there were four of the SNCC people that were there, the official SNCC people that were there. And this was in 60, 61, I think.

Faulkenbury:

Was that your first meeting of SNCC activists?

Sellers:

That was my first meeting of SNCC activists. But when I was in high school, and this was before, no, this was just after the sit-ins, Ella Baker came to Vorhees.

Faulkenbury:

Oh, okay.

Sellers:

And my mother went to that seminar and she told me about it. I didn't know, but she told me about Ella Baker talking about the spirit in and certain excitement that was going on, but she didn't go into, this was going to happen and that's going to happen. But she just talked about things are beginning to look better and open up and African-Americans are going to press hard and that kind of thing. So I just thought the cross of history right through that period of time was very unique. And that's what Ella Baker did. She went to campuses and she talked with Department of Sociology, and she got them all engaged. And so that's how we ended up with her being here. So I was able to clip a period when she was the article out of the student newspaper. They didn't write very much about that in small rural communities. So that's what that is. But that's again where I am getting elevated to find my place and find my way. And then I got organized the NAACP Youth chapter here on campus. And with that, I ran into some problems because I had gotten a church and we had brought in a NAACP person from Atlanta who was coming in to have this rally, and we were going to get that all kicked off. And

At that, I guess the president at my mother's school was saying, you need to get him to tone it down. And so some of her friends came by and they would kind of knock on the door, I'd go to the door and they said, your mom is trying to help you, so sometimes you have to back off for a minute. And then my father came in and said, I know you got the rally up the street, but you can't go.

And so that created that father son kind of conflict, and we wanted to move away from that. And so at that point, I was ready to leave and go on where my spirits felt like I needed to be. And so in 62, I graduated and went on to Howard that fall. And then I was able to tie in with the rest of the Mohicans, Stokely Carmichael and Mary Lovelace and Muriel Tillen has, and Cynthia Washington and Cortland Cox and Charlie Cobb. And there were a number of others who had been there, were there when I got there. Dion Diamond and Chuck McDo, I met him after he left South Carolina. But Chuck McDo, who was the chairman during the time the stuff was going on in Rock Hill, chairman of SNCC was a student at South Carolina State and got into a whole bunch of stuff in South Carolina State after 1960. And then he left school and went to work with SNCC. So again, the paths are crossing all over the place. And Mike Farewell was there also. And there were a number of other students like, like I said, luminaries, Leroy Jones was a distant person, but he would come down. And then we had the group come together and we decided to take over the functions there, the important functions at the institution. That was the way we were going to try to educate the student body. So we took over the Student government association, the newspaper,

Several of other offices. And so we were just all over the place. And was some of that through nag? That was nag. That was nag, yes. Nag. And that was a very nurturing kind of group.

Faulkenbury:

And that was the non-violent action group,

Sellers:

Making sure it's very, it wasn't anything complicated.

Faulkenbury:

A wonderful name.

Sellers:

Yeah. And so we took over the lycm program, and that's when we fought with them to get Malcolm X there. And we had to fight with them to get by it rust in there. And by it eventually said, you all just kid, y'all don't know anything about this. We took him there and we had a debate with by it about where things would be going and where they should be going. And they always looked at us as the juveniles. They don't know nothing about nothing. So finally we got around to, I think, kind of convincing him in the later life. I'm not sure they ever convinced him.

Faulkenbury:

And what was the event with Malcolm x

Sellers:

Lycum

Faulkenbury:

Oh, I see. Lecture in

Sellers:

Crampton, the lecture. Yeah. They fought tooth and nail over Malcolm coming, and we finally got Malcolm at the school, and school survived it,

But they were, oh man, what can we do? So when those people would come, we would, after the program was over, we'd take him over to Stokely's apartment, which I ended up sharing with him later on my last semester in my last year at Howard. And he would cook up some spaghetti and we'd just sit around and we'd just kind of go at it and challenge. And that was very good. And we did the same kind of thing with Malcolm. So Malcolm knew us, and Malcolm used to refer to us as the Children of the movement. I mean, that's what he used to say. There goes some of the movement children over there. And that's, I think at the point where people in SNCC, and especially those who were in the Washington area, there's Ivanhoe Donaldson up there now, and Lester McKinney and Marion Barry. And so the group is getting much larger, and we are not really children, but that was Malcolm affectionate way of talking about us. And then we began to look at ourselves as the children of Malcolm, because we were beginning to read Malcolm and began to understand his philosophy

And all. And then Malcolm made that transition. And I think that that's the part of Malcolm that's so unique and so wonderful that when people talk about, oh man, I love Malcolm, which Malcolm,

Faulkenbury:

Right?

Sellers:

Yeah.

Faulkenbury:

There was a change for evolution.

Sellers:

That was the evolution. And that was a beautiful thing because Malcolm, when he was committed to something, he was committed a hundred percent. He ate what you told him to eat. He walked like everything he did, it all

Faulkenbury:

Stayed totally loyal to that's

Sellers:

Right.

Faulkenbury:

NLI.

Sellers:

Yeah.

Faulkenbury:

Until later,

Sellers:

Until he changed. When he changed, then he would tell you that, look, I'm done. I'm going over to the other side to a side, and if you want to keep up, it's no love loss. It's just that I am much more educated and knowledgeable and sophisticated about how I see this struggle. And so that's why it was fairly easy for us when Malcolm, when we got Malcolm in Tuskegee in the back of our minds, was that we would set it up so that he would have some extra time that he could go to Selma. And so for a long time, that was never put in the history books about Malcolm going to Selma.

And the president at Tuskegee had kind of fought like the folk, but we told them, said that we had the same thing, and we just have to push the pedal to the metal. And what happens is is that you get the administration to capitulate, they probably called in some extra law people and all that kind of stuff and say, I don't want y'all to do anything, but just listen to him and let him go and be done. So got him to Tuskegee and he spoke at Tuskegee, I don't know whether anybody paid attention to it, but then got into Brown Chapel.

Faulkenbury:

What is Brown Chapel?

Sellers:

Brown Chapel is the central location for the Selma of Montgomery March. That's where the marches were actually coming from when they were trying to get over Edmund Pettis Bridge

Faulkenbury:

And where they were retreated to largely afterwards.

Sellers:

Yes. So we were able to get him in there, and Dr. King was out raising monies, I think in CL Washington somewhere, so he wasn't there. And so SCLC was kind of nervous and turning their hands.

They put, I think CT Vivian and Coretta and probably Fred Shuttlesworth on the program. And Malcolm was just, I mean, he was just laughing the whole way through. And he was just talking about, you all support Dr. King and what he's trying to do here. That was his thing. He said, I am not a nonviolent person, but I think that you need to know that. And the status quo need to know that there's another guy that wants to do it another way. I'm that guy, but I want you to support Dr. King. He's given a lot. He's paid his dues and all that kind of stuff. Let's get this going. And then probably was two weeks after he was in Selma, he was killed. So when he did that, we had connections then, and we got him connected to, got him connected to Fannie Lou Hamer, who had gone up the summer of 64

With a group of students from McComb, Mississippi. And they actually went to the auto ballroom where he was assassinated, and Malcolm spoke there, and then they had Malcolm come over and speak at where they were. And so he developed this kind of bond and friendship. And I think that's when people, the kids began to tell Malcolm that non-violence was not a way of life for them, and don't get that confused, but nonviolence under the conditions that we were on, was the exact tactic to deal with moral persuasion or how you convince the country that what the segregation is of doing is unconstitutional and inhumane and just downright wrong. That you had to show that sometimes. So you had to put yourself in a position where they acted that out. And the other thing is, is that when they used to have training sessions for nonviolent activities, especially around the sit-ins and the freedom rides and all that kind of stuff, because you didn't want to put somebody out there who was completely defenseless if you couldn't get out the crowd and they were going to hit you anyhow, you get into that fetal position and you hold your head hands back around the back of your head and over your ears, And you just tuck.

And when you saw an opening, get up and run like heck. And so that's what they told. Malcolm said, there were farmers down there who somebody came and shot in their house, they shot back. And Malcolm said, well, I just saw it from one side that you wanted me to go down there, and then when somebody started beating on me, you wanted me to, they said, no, no, no, no, no, Malcolm not about that. This is what it is. It's a tactical device that many of us used and many of us had to use. And when you see the police getting involved, you can do that for a while. Like Birmingham Bull Connors. I guess if there wasn't a bull comment, we would've had to invent one

In order for you to see how people responded to that. You can see the kind of platitudes that you see right now in terms of how people talk about race relation and how race relations go When you uncover that, lift that up. It's not about that at all. I mean, but nobody acts it out. Some people are beginning to act it out in terms of their conversations and in terms of their just getting on some kind of video and going beyond about their attitude toward minorities or blacks or women or whatever that is. So back then we just smoked it out so that we'd get to that earlier. The other thing that was going was was that the African-American community usually uphill the moral authority and could actually get people to look at how much progress America was making. If you still have, after hundreds of years slavery or discrimination or oppression going on minorities, then you haven't gotten to where you can say that we have taken care of that problem, that issue. And so the African-American community keeps saying that We just ask that you treat us like you say, that's all. We are not asking for any handouts. We just want to be treated like human beings just like everybody else. If you don't have the right to vote, you have the right to vote. And see the attitude right now is that you roll that back. You talk about voter registration, and you talk about all kinds of other activities, how you deny people opportunities to vote, how you have the long lines,

All of that, how you don't have enough machines and all that kind of stuff. And then you check in people and ID and all that kind of stuff, right back to where we were before in terms of attitudes. But back then, we could actually make Bull Connors, one of the sheriffs in one county, just go beyond the Paola. And America's patience was not so cavalier as it is now. And they would say, okay, y'all need to stop that. Everybody needs to have one man, one vote. Everybody needs to have that. So that's where the tactic of nonviolence was employed. But after probably about 1964, that tactic was no longer people felt. And then with the Voting Rights Act, everybody felt that, well, you got the right to vote. That's what you were talking about. Then the whole problem should be over. And so at that point, even SNCC began to look for different tactical devices to move the struggle to the next level.

Can, I dunno, we're getting

Sellers:

Close.

Faulkenbury:

Okay, well stop me whenever. But let me ask how, when you were at Howard and you were involved in nag with Stokely Carmichael and others, NAG was a friends of SNCC associate, right? So how did you become, or can you trace how you went from Howard, how you left early into working for Snic in Mississippi?

Well, I think first we had 1963, I think it was the spring of 1963. We were engaged with Gloria Richardson in Cambridge,

Faulkenbury:

Right,

Sellers:

In Maryland. So we had that kind of issue.

Before that, NAG was the official arm of SNCC that picketed the Justice Department and the White House. And we had to go and holler at Congress people and all that kind of stuff. So we did all of that, all of those kinds of activities. Matter of fact, we even had a SNCC meeting on the Howards campus where we brought all the staff up. So we were in what I call a training mode At that particular time. That's the first place I had gotten arrested for civil rights, and we were freed up, and Cambridge was under martial law, and you just had a mess up there. So that's what we had going on.

Faulkenbury:

So Cambridge was what you experienced in Cambridge, the kind of repression that the National Guardsman put on marchers and the gassing and things like that. How did you respond to that and how did

Sellers:

That motivate it? It just motivated me and made me feel more tied in.

So I would imagine that coming out of Cambridge and after the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing, that many of us had to raise the question, were we doing enough being part-time students and part-time activists? And I think it was a question that if there was some kind of way that we could find something that would have a large impact, might have to give up the school thing in order for us to do that. And so those kinds of events actually led us to going to Mississippi the summer. We knew early on that we were going to go to Mississippi, many of us. And so our job was to recruit as many minority students as we possibly could out of that area. So we recruited from Morgan State and University of Maryland. We took all three of their black students at that point, and Howard and George Washington and Georgetown and every little school they're in that we were able to get minority students out. I think we must've ended up with about 30 some students that went out of Washington, all went out, not African American, but we ended up with some numbers like that

Together. And so we also were able to get a contiguous district, district two, which Stokely was the chairperson for, and then he distributed people to be project directors in that district. That was the most productive district that summer in terms of building the MFDP and building freedom schools and all that kind of stuff. And so many of the Howard students were there, and Stokely was the chair of that, not chair, but the director of that particular district. And we registered more people as Freedom Democratic Party participants. So it was an incubation for us at the Justice Department. And then there were times when I actually represented the SNCC at the White House, me and John Lewis. And we would use that base as a kind of leafing base for us to go in to do that kind of thing. That was, I think the fall of 65 or the winter of 64. I can't remember. I'm sorry. Either the spring of 65 or the winter of 64. I thought it happened before the Selma incident that we were at the White House talking about different conferences that President Lyndon Bain Johnson would do. And we used our presence there at Howard and some of the other Snickers who were at Howard to kind of leapfrog and get us into that thing. I remember Rat went with us to the White House and he came back with all the souvenirs. But anyhow, the nucleus of the nag, all of the NAG people went to Mississippi,

All of them, with the exception of maybe one. But everybody went to Mississippi and all of us had projects. Cynthia was in Cleveland, Cynthia and Muriel Tillen has was in Greenville. Stokely was in Greenwood. But he left that and turned that over to a local person named Mary Lane. I was in Holly Springs. Fred Mangram was in there somewhere. He was a student at Howard. And there were a couple of other students from that area. Were there.

Faulkenbury:

Can you describe the process of, was it not an easy transition is the wrong way to put it, but what was the transition from Washington and Cambridge, Maryland into the work with the MFDP and with voter registration in Mississippi?

Sellers:

No, no transition because I grew up in South Carolina, rural South Carolina. It was going back in the same community. And when I went to Mississippi, we were on one of those special assignments going in with the searching for the bodies. I mean, they were missing tension already. You had the tension already there. And so by the time you get to Mississippi, that's gone. You can't skate you anymore. You just go in and do your job. And that's the way we saw it. You'd go in, you'd do your job, you know what you had to do, you had to get out. And the first job was to survive it. And that wasn't just in terms of the physical sense, that was also an emotional sense. So you had to kind of lock those things down.

But once you got there, other people were just, arms were open. Y'all looked like y'all eaten in two or three weeks. You come by the house on Sunday and we'll have a big meal for you. We'd have so much you can't stand. And then Mary Sue down share her big day is on Tuesday. Y'all go by there on Tuesday night and she'd fix you up. And we would say, we are here and we are trying to do the best we can. They said, sweetheart, just do what you can. We have faith that something good is going to come of this thing. And that was kind of refreshing and kind of pat on the back that you needed to keep the whole process going. But it was tough. You're talking about 18, 19-year-old folk

Meeting all of this. And the other part of it is, is that you also recognized the responsibility that anytime I sent somebody out to try to register, vote, I sent 'em out with the possibility of them getting killed, getting arrested, and having to do time, getting their families burnt out, losing their jobs, losing everything they had. So now that didn't fall on somebody else's shoulder, that fell on your shoulders. So you have to deal with that. And the only thing you could tell 'em is, is that I'll go with you. And sometimes you would just do that just for the sake of feeling good about what it is that you're doing. And that's a difficult one. There are some people who have had to deal with that and haven't dealt with that very well. People got hurt, people got killed, people lost everything. But I think that the question is not what role? Where's your hand in this operation? We probably can't answer that question. That's not a question that we can naturally answer, but it was something that had to be done and it wasn't any way to get around it, and you just had to grow up at a very young age. And we just stepped up to it and then kept it moving. Okay, we're going to have to break.

That sounds good. We'll pick it up tomorrow.

Tape #2

Faulkenbury:

Okay, this is, once again, the interviewer is Evan Faulkenbury. I'm interviewing Dr. Cleveland Sellers Jr. Today is March 19th, 2013, and we are in Denmark, South Carolina on the campus at Borhees College. So the first question, Dr. Sellers, in this part two of our interview, can you describe arriving in Mississippi in 1964 and specifically to discuss SNS activism in Mississippi from your perspective before the 1965 Voting Rights Act? So about that year or so you were there before that.

Sellers:

Alright, I want to just step back. The year prior to 1964, in the summer, SNCC had what was called a freedom election, a voter election. And what we were trying to do, we centered around, I think the title was Freedom Vote. And what we tried to do was we tried to find candidates in Mississippi that would run in a mock election, essentially what that was. And so Ms. Fannie, Lou Ham, I think ran for Senator and a number of other, Ms. Annie Devine ran for something. There were a number of people who ran for office, and the idea was to indicate to both the Democratic and the Republican Party that Mississippi Citizens, African-American were interested in being a part of the political process. And that the only reason they were not a part was because they didn't have the right to vote. And so that mock election was actually set up where they brought a small number of students in to help with the elections and the elections consisted of having the candidates on the day of the election go to a church, which would be a polling place and actually register.

So they mobilized a lot of folk to actually participate in this mock collection. And I think that was the genesis for moving to 1964, where you would get a larger group of young people to come into Mississippi and you could address many of the ills that existed in Mississippi, certainly discrimination, but the absence of the right to vote, the educational issue, the health issues, and all those kinds of things would come together around the Mississippi Summer 1964. So going into Mississippi in 1964 of the summer, there were students from many of the Ivy and the more established liberal arts colleges who actually got the call probably in January about coming to Mississippi for that purpose.

Hey, how you doing? I'm good. I'll start it back up. You're good. Okay. And so the idea was to get these college students and to put 'em in communities and actually have them work on this new idea and tactic, and that was to challenge the seating of the regular Democratic Party. The Democratic Party said it was inclusive and it was, you talk about the liberal wing of it and all those kinds of things. The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party wanted to go through the same parallel processes, similar to the mock election in getting a delegation prepared to go the to National Democratic Party Convention in Atlantic City.

And that was the key in the cornerstone of the Mississippi Summer Project. In the process of doing that, we would have some voter registration activity, but we knew that we weren't going to get very far with that. We thought that it was very important for us to register for the political party as many people as we could and use that as a petition to the Democratic Party saying all these people signed up, but they were denied opportunities to be a part of the Democratic Party.

Plus the regular Democratic party voted Republican in 1960, and the entire Democratic state went with, I think it was Goldwater 60, and that there were other examples of the Democratic Party in Mississippi violating policy of the regular Democratic Party. So we wanted to make the case for that whole thing. The other parts of that was we wanted to address the issue of the education of Americans in Mississippi. And so we did a kind of parallel school, we call those the Freedom schools, in which we actually had master teachers out of Boston and other parts, California in those classrooms teaching and the beginning of the process of teaching African-American history. And that was fun because up to that point there had been a celebration of Black History Week, but there was no real concentration within the status quo, even within the African-American community to build on that history, do the research, get it into books and actually make it available. There was some, but it was limited and it was restricted.

So we figured that we could break out of that while we were breaking out of the shackles. That denied us the opportunity to register to vote. The other was the Freedom Schools. The other was creating a method in which we could actually provide some preventive medicines and we could actually do some procedures and that kind of thing to help kids primarily with the kind of afflictions that they were going through. There were the diseases that you find in third world countries that were very common, scurry and scurvy and other diseases that were directly related to poll nutritional intake. And so we wanted to attack that issue too. So we were able to organize the Doctors for Human rights who then brought in nurses and doctors and they would go into the project areas and actually set up a clinic and have people come in, especially children, to find out what kinds of issues that they had to address in providing some preventive health education in those communities and also providing some remedies to some of the young people who had issues with health. I remember a case of shortly after 1964 when many of the doctors returned back to their respected areas after the summer of 1964 set up in New York, doctors for Human Rights, the Doctor Committee for Human Rights, I think is what it was called, or the Medical Committee for Human Rights.

And Mrs. Hamer went up and she was getting an exam and hadn't really had that kind of access to medical attention in Mississippi. And Ms. Hamer had a limp and she thought that she was, when she had that checked by a doctor, I don't think he even looked at it, but he said that she probably had polio. So she was an impression that she had polio. When they got her to the doctor in New York, she found out that some way she had broken that ankle

It hadn't set back properly. And she, for some almost 30 years or 40 years, this happened when she was a child because it had been that way for such a long period of time, they couldn't, couldn't repair it. And they said that it would've been a simple process of breaking the ankle and then setting it right. And I mean, she just kind of boohooed about that because she always thought that her lymph was directly related to polio and the diagnosis was not only faulty, but they were created a situation for her that she didn't have to go through. So that gives you some ideas about the level of that kind of thing.

Now, I went to northern Mississippi in the Delta, which is the area that most of the African-Americans were located in because that was the farmland, the Hod land of Mississippi and where the larger plantations were. And we did have what we call freedom days. And that's where we had a number of people that we would find that were interested in registering to vote. And we would try to get 'em all together on a particular day and we would go with them down to the polls to see if they could be registered to vote. So we had those kinds of things, but much of our time was spent in communities organizing these newly registered members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. When I'm talking about organizing, first thing you have to do is get a form, get it filled out. Sellers: Then you have to bring people together at some place in order for you to explain all of what the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was about and what it was trying to do and the procedures for getting delegates, I guess, certified to go up. And that would be going to the precinct meetings, going to the district meetings, going to the state meeting and electing delegates as you go up so that those delegates would actually represent the whole of Mississippi at the convention. And one of the things that we were able to do with that is we were able to get a professor from Tougaloo College as the lone white delegates, but we had a diverse delegation going in, and this is in 1964. The shackles of segregation was still pretty much entrenched even though the civil rights bill had been released in June of that period of time. But two months later, we had this diverse group that went up to Mississippi. Now the state had prepared because they knew that we were going to have this Mississippi Freedom Summer, and they had prepared, but their preparation was almost like a military preparation. And so they just hardened bought tanks and new guns and tear gas and all that kind of stuff. I don't know what at that point they thought was going to happen.

And so they deputized everybody in every county, every white person in every county that they could deputize. And so they had pretty much militia, posses that kind of operation going on. So we knew it wasn't going to be easy. And when Shriner Goodman and Cheney came up missing, we had certain security precautions that we had in place and procedures that we had in place. And so they didn't utilize any of those things, which simply indicated to us that they had were dead. And so even before the orientation was over, Bob Moses had to go in and address the volunteers who had not gotten into Mississippi yet,

To the fact that the people who were just there a day before Ren now did. And that people who were going into Mississippi and knew it was going to be pretty hostile, they had to make a choice now because it's no longer the threat. It is the reality that somebody will actually lose their lives. And so during that summer, we ended up with a total of six people who lost their lives. All of 'em were young people. One was from Holly Springs, Mississippi on my project and Wayne Yancy, and in a mysterious traffic accident that nobody still can explain.

And then we had two young people that were found down in, I think it was around Natchez, but in southwest Mississippi. They were found in a river. One had the upper tonsils of the body and the other one had the lower tonsils or some kind of disfiguration, but they were able to identify who they were. And I think a couple of years ago, 2000, 2006, 2007, they actually tried the person who killed them, they finally, well, they had identified him earlier, but they finally got through the federal or the FBI's effort to open cold cases. They were able to convict. But you're talking about some almost 50 years after this has taken place, so well at least 40 years after. But those were some of the deaths that were caused during that summer. And you had somewhere in the neighborhood of 3000 arrests of various andary volunteers and local people and all that kind of stuff.

You had roughly, I think it was about 52 house and church bombings or burnings during that summer. You had all kinds of incidents that really made the experience very traumatic for many of the folk who were involved in this freedom sum activity and process. I think it was a transforming kind of experience that changed the lives of all the people who were there and who were involved. Never to go back to being adolescent, never go back to being the innocent kind of bystander, always feeling a need to continue to fight for democracy and freedom and justice inequality fall. And I think that was the same thing for many of us in SNCC now, we were able to, in the second district register, the most members have the largest number of Freedom schools, effective freedom schools. We even organized community centers and recreation activities in these rural communities and had health clinics set up with nurses and doctors in those facility. So if you go back and look at it, the area that needed to be the most productive was the area that was the most productive. And we also had the local meetings of the party and we had the precinct meetings and et cetera.

One of the things we found was was that the Democratic Party would actually advertise publicly where they were going to have the meetings. So they would meet the letter of the law for the Democratic Party, the Mississippi Democratic Party. And what they would do is they would change and send out a communication to everybody to meet somewhere else, maybe on the same day, but not at the place they have set up. And that was for the purpose of not having us come into their meetings and ask for inclusion in that whole process. So we documented all of these things. We actually had the balance of the registration forms. We had the balance. We went down to Philadelphia, Mississippi, and we got the car that Goodman and Cheney were in. We also got the church bell from the church that was burned down. And we also put together a pretty quick committee that saw the reconstruction of that church in that area.

And that was kind of like the first time that Bob actually got down there. They had a service in the burnout church, and you could see people actually sitting on chairs in that church, not giving up hope and not losing the faith. And that was real critical for many of us who were very young and sometimes our faith would, and hope would kind of fade. And folk in Mississippi said, no, you got to keep going. And these were folk who didn't have very much of a material kind of wealth of basis. These were people who said that you had to be able to dream, you had to have that hope and hope in a better future and having that faith. So those are the things that I think were tremendously important to us moving forward. And then we got these things. Matter of fact, I had the truck with the bell.

We put the bell on the top of the truck and the car on the back of it, and we drove it up and we put it on the boardwalk at Atlantic City right next to the convention center so that people could actually see that history. And we also had the ballots there, and we had everything that we needed to have. And we thought that we were going to put together a delegation that would make the case. Certainly Ms. Hamer and Ms. Annie Devine and what's her name, Blackwell, and a number of other Steptoe and a number of other legends in their own time in Mississippi strategized. And we went from one process to the other. When we first got there, we started letting the delegates fan out and actually meeting delegates from other areas. And with all, we had some sympathizers until we found out that party politics devoid of morality.

And so it's power politics, and we hadn't thought of it that way. We are still kind of in this idealistic world that if we could show that what we represented was the good versus what the Mississippi regular Democratic Party representative was bad, evil or ugly or whatever, that the National Party would just rally to our position. And we went through that whole process with having Lyndon Bain Johnson had Hubert Humphrey take the responsibility for negotiating this and getting this done. And then Humphrey delegated it to Mondale. And that's one of the reasons why I think that even as each of these people come and move through this process, Mondale was not successful, I think because in the back of a lot of African-American's mind his role in the trying to get the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to consent to a victory of two delegates at large.

And we had a session there when that proposal was made at a church somewhere in Newark. I don't know where the church was, but we did go, I did go. And they had a marathon meeting and they brought all of these civil rights and civil libertarians and all to tell the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, they should accept this as a token. I mean, you have one, right, two seats, two seats at large. That means they could be anywhere and it could be in New Jersey, and they probably were going to be in New Jersey, New York, a Connecticut.

But the delegates heard all of this. And then after that was over, they came together and they talked about the struggle over the summer. The summer in Mississippi was very much parallel to the summer in Vietnam. I mean, you had enemy fire, you had attacks. All these kinds of things happen on a regular basis. And we did what we call Watts reports. This is where you had the watts lines and you could actually report in and we could actually, from the Atlanta office, get information and collect information because the Watts line was in Atlanta. And so we have these, of all the incidents that occurred during that period of time is yay thick. And it reported on all the incidents of arrest, all the incidents of harassment, all the incidents of shootings and beatings and all those kinds of things. So we had a comprehensive record of all that data. We were a little ahead of our times. We had security set up with our automobiles that included CV radios, citizen van radios, and those things worked most of the time. And they did provide security to a number of people who, if they had not had those CCBs would probably have gotten caught out in the dusty roads of Mississippi,

Never to be found again or found again, not alive. So we did all of the things that we could possibly do. And many of the delegates had been a part of that process. They, Fannie Lou Hamer was snick, so there wasn't a difference. So when she is looking through that, she says, now we've come a long ways and we have a lot of pride and we have a lot of dignity, and we don't think this is a victory, and we don't think that there's been any compromise at all.

I mean, we propose that we have all the delegates, and you come back and say, you can't have any of the delegate seats. And so they said that what we will do is we will vote not to accept that and we'll go back to Mississippi, start over again. And that's what they did. But before they left to do that, they all came the next night to the Democratic Party Convention, and the Mississippi delegation had gone on back to Mississippi. They were through. And so the seats were open, and so they got tickets to get into the building, and then they just went and occupied the seats for the Mississippi delegation. Eventually they were rousted from that, but they did have an opportunity to sit in those seats. And that was a moral victory for many of those individuals that took it on to be involved in other political campaigns in Mississippi and to get a chance themselves to get the power to run for office themselves.

So that's the way that whole process went. But it was for the staff, it was very disappointing. We had put people at risk. We had a used every ounce of energy that we had to get documentation of the atrocities as people attempted to register, vote, or even go to a precinct meeting, none of those issues were considered. The issue that was considered was what kind of impact that would have on the Southern Democratic delegations in the future. Now, there are some benefits that come out of this, and that is that the Democratic party later would say that in 1968 that all of the southern delegations had to be diverse, and that included women as well as African-Americans. So there were some benefits. And that's the first rung, I think, on the road to having the opportunity to have Barack Obama elected president and 2008, all his groundwork, all this footwork, all this suffering and sacrifice actually created the, and started the process for that to happen. There were a lot of other things in between Shirley Chisholm running and Jesse Jackson running twice. But the beginning of that is Fannie Lou Hamer getting on the flow of the assembly and testifying and raising questions about this America

That I live in, and why is it that I seem to live in a pot tide society in Mississippi that's supposed to be a part of America? And so that's the way we connected those dots. And very shortly after that, we began to have some questions about the agenda of that liberal labor coalition that was built around the 1963 march on Washington. And pretty much about a year after the march on Washington, that coalition began to kind of tear apart because we had said very specifically what it was that was our goals. And many of those people who were a part of that march on Washington came in to ask the delegation to accept the compromise. So the other was that the question of the interests of the Democratic Party, whether or not that interest and the interests of the African-American community were in sync, I think that the conclusion was was that it wasn't just a Democratic party, but the two political parties, their interests weren't in sync with that of the African- American community.

And so SNCC suffering, what we considered a tremendous defeat, began to reassess and retrench with the idea that we needed to come up with some kind of way in which we empowered the African-American community. Mississippi was a clear example that you're not going to do it through the Democratic Party. It'll be a paternalistic kind of relationship with the Democratic Party. We would never win, and they would actually begin to set the tactical devices that would be appropriate. And we felt like we needed to have that power to determine how it is that we secure the freedom. So we began to look at that and began to work on that. By this time, 65, I had become program director of SNC, and we were looking at the possibility of organizing independent parties that were independent of the Republican and Democratic Party. So now, when we began to look at that, we were no longer just the labor and liberal opposition, but now the Democratic Party, which is labor liberal, was a little concerned about the direction that we were taking. But nevertheless, we kept pursuing that. And Jack Minna, our research director, actually found this civil law, the law that said that in Alabama you could organize a party in a county

And enlist what the process was to do that kind of thing. And so we got Stokely to go into Alabama. He was in Mississippi and headed up that project, and he thought it was best for him to come out of there because there was a lot of frustration and anger about what had happened. And he needed to get himself back on the ground and in the field and organizing. And so he went to Alabama. And one of the things I had to do was there were a lot of resources that were coming in for the Mississippi Summer project, but after we challenged the democratic parties, a lot of those resources began to dwindle as they began to see the alienation take place between the movement and this segment of the movement. We're talking about young people and SNCC and the established movement, the traditional movement types.

Faulkenbury:

And can I ask a more specific question about that? From when you were the program director for cofo, for Council of Federated Organizations, and when you were at the Holly Springs site?

Sellers:

Okay. I was project director.

Faulkenbury:

Oh, project director. Excuse me. When you were in that role, can you describe the ways that you raised money for SNCC and the ways in which you fund raised the kind of outside resources that were coming in?

Sellers:

First, there wasn't that many outside resources coming in. Many of the young students that had come down were asked to bring what funds they could,

And our survival, if you have to talk about survival, was directly correlated with the level of work we did, because then the community would provide the meals and transportation, and every now and then some gas or whatever it is, they could actually provide. There was not in our area, a lot of people leaving the area to go out to raise any monies they could write home to parents and ask the parents to set up a little something and maybe raise a couple of hundred dollars. But we were working on shoestrings. We were working without resources during that period. The pay was up and down. Sometimes you got it, sometimes you didn't, and it wasn't but $9 a week, so there wasn't any money there. A lot of times we would, working in Mississippi, you would work for about two months, then you'd go over to Atlanta and maybe eat a meal at a restaurant and maybe go to the theater and you had to stay in a hotel usually, or you went to the Freedom House there. But if you were trying to get out of the Freedom House, you'd just want to go to a hotel or someplace like that,

And then you'd probably have to borrow money to get back to Mississippi. So I mean, there was no groundswell of money that was coming in. And like I said, that money, as soon as the Democratic Party began to feel like we were not in lockstep, they began to cut the funds. And that's one of the reasons why you had the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, which is what we called it, become known as the Black Panther Party,

Because it was in the interest of the Democratic Party to make any independent political party illegitimate. And they thought that they would make it illegitimate by making it something that was violent and all those other kinds of things, something that was very narrowly nationalists and those kinds of things. And so the press was much larger than we were, and that segment, the Democratic Party had influenced there. And so they actually were able to describe this new organization coming up as the Black Panther Party to try to scare people away, including African-Americans, certainly supporters away. And so we continued to pursue that. One of the things I had to do was to find resources. And so we got in that project, we got the more seasoned Snickers in that project, and they understood what they had to do. They had to do work, they had to entrench themselves in those communities, and they had to find ways in which they could actually live in those communities and survive in those communities.

So Lowndes County was like that. And then Green County, and then I forget what county Selma's in Dallas County, those three, and there was one other was four of 'em, I can't remember the other one right now. But we put people in those areas that had tremendous amount of experience, and a lot of them were people out of that nag group also. So they were kind around to kind of move the needle again, as had happened in Mississippi. And my responsibility was to juggle that so that we weren't taking away from somebody else to provide resources to Lowndes County. And it became a priority for me because I understood the efforts to create a new model that would talk about building, well talk about empowerment, but also talk about building an independent political process that would achieve some degree of black power and then can negotiate with all the other entities, whatever. They may have been, the Republican party, democratic Party, just with segregationists who said that, okay, for this county where you are in the majority, we are willing to concede this if politically, if you concede that. And so we just thought that that was a breath of fresh air coming into the movement. We were going to create these new models, we had a lot of energy, and we wanted to just go forward with that whole process like that. Right.

Lemme ask you questions about that period, whatever.

Faulkenbury:

Yeah. One more quick question about the finances with SNCC in more general terms, did they receive funds from the voter education project from VEP?

Sellers:

We received funds from the Voter education project early on, but those funds even dwindled and dried up. Mississippi was a pivotal point. And it was also the kind of christening for Snickers. We had conceded the tone of our speech at March, Washington, and this was a time when we had to make a call and we decided that we would stick with our principles and stick with our values because that's what the Mississippi Union did. And so that gave us the kind of maturity to be able to make those kinds of decisions. And then from then on, we said what we meant and we meant what we said, and we continued to move forward in that light that we weren't waiting on somebody and we were going try to look good and make somebody else feel good. It's whatever we thought and we came up with and researched and concluded was the best method in which we could actually get the empowerment. And then moving on to identity and kind of politics, those things became very important to us.

Faulkenbury:

So you've talked a little bit about the progression of your involvement in S NCC C in 1964 into 1965, into the Lowndes County Freedom Organization. So can you describe or talk about, because you joined SNCC at a young age. Then quickly you were in a position of leadership. Can you describe how it was that you became a leader within SNCC so quickly?

Sellers:

Well, I think that like going into Mississippi, I had already had the experience of the march on Washington, had the experience of Cambridge, had the experience at Voorhees. And so when I became a project director in Mississippi, I worked very closely with the organizers in Mississippi, and that's where most of our organizers were. And then I began to have communications with the organizers in Georgia and Arkansas. So we had all of these folk who pride themselves on the fact that they had organizing skills, they understood community organizing, they understood how you build organizations for change. They understood the kind of sacrifices you had to make, and those kinds of things were the key ingredient. And I kept trying to bring that group together. And I think that that's how I managed to get the support. And I represented a new entity, the program director's position, nnc, and I was also not quite in the camp of John Lewis. So what we were doing was we were getting ready to move forward and organize the influence of the organizer into SNCC so that it wouldn't be the national office just making decisions without having the input of the feel in. And I think I kind of campaign on that idea, on that notion that we need to have a voice.

We are the ones out here. And a lot of times in areas where there's little or no communication, somebody has to at least be considerate of what's going on.

When that's shifting around resources and all that kind of stuff, we thought that that group needed to have not only voice, but also treasure, and that we felt like when there were new cause purchased and distributed, that those people who worked in really hostile areas should have the fastest and the best automobiles. That was just a given. And there was no way in the organization that that was being done. And a lot of the functions of the project, I mean the program director of SNCC were early on under the ages of the executive secretary, and we thought that needed to be separated out so that the field staff would actually get, like I said, influence and recognition and voice in the operation of the organization. That's how we ended up going to Alabama. If we'd have gone through the other process, we probably would've stayed with something that was going to go maybe to Alabama and talk about getting Alabama into the Democratic Party, same kind of model that we used in Mississippi. But we learned each time around, every time we made that kind of step off, we learned and we transformed the organization and transform ourselves and kept it moving because after we go into Lowndes County and begin to build the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, we also have this discussion that actually comes up during the summer of 1964 about Vietnam.

And then we are organizing in Alabama in Tuskegee voter registration drives, trying to get people to register to vote. And one of our very dear friends, Sammy Young is killed down in that voter registration campaign. And at that point, we talked about the fact that he was a veteran and he had a purple heart. And how is it that somebody who's going to Vietnam come back and get killed in America fighting for the democracy they claim to be fighting for in Vietnam? So as soon as he was killed, s NCC folk came together, and I think it was Gloria House and some others sat down and drafted the anti-Vietnam War statement for SNCC. And so that comes out even before black power. And some people get that all convoluted and twisted.

Yeah, that's interesting.

Sellers:

And not only does it talk about that, but it also talks about the statement, the anti-Vietnam statement, talk about our relationship, our efforts to relate to those who are struggling against apartheid in South Africa and freedom and justice in the Congo. And so we brought all of those struggles into the mix. So we were beginning to make that shift, that transition from a civil rights to more human rights, to even an international kind of struggling from that broadening of the language in terms of our dialogue. We also began to talk about liberation because we began to see some parallels between the colonial kind of setups and regimes around the world that people were fighting against, and a Watts Harlem where you had the same kind of parallels. And so the whole notion about liberation comes out of that. So now we get from January to the Mississippi, Meredith march, and then black power comes out. But a lot of people leave out the Vietnam and assume that the black power thing is some kind of very narrow nationalism. We don't like white folk. And we had to battle that not only with the outside world and those who were trying to condemn us based on that kind of fight, and by some people who were members of SNCC. We also had to battle that we inside of SNC,

Because there were elements in there that wanted to have us camp out on that very narrow kind of perspective. We were never for that. We were willing to fight. And so we fought that off as best we could.

Faulkenbury:

So there were some within S NCC who didn't want to become more internationalist in thinking or address the Vietnam War?

Sellers:

No, no. They wanted to because SNCC did. But when it got time to talk about black power, they wanted to revert back to this little white, black kind of analysis assessment. If you're talking about international struggles, you pass that narrow kind of skin color, I guess, ideology, if you want to call it that. And what I'm saying is, is that we were at that point when we talked about black power as opening that up, but there were some tactical things that we thought were important. One is that we didn't want to give it definition so that the status quo would then sit over here and just take that whole thing apart. When the civil rights movement started out, and you talk about Brown, if you want to go back, that there was talk about equity,

And somewhere down the line, somebody figured that equity was not going to be something that would meet the satisfaction of your resistance. So then we began to talk about integration, and the movement seemed that gotten caught in talking about integration and lost the talk about equity. And it took us a long time to get out of that. So we said, if we can say that what we want is black power and we want to give people an opportunity to express and articulate what that is, and then we'll pull it all together and talk about what black power is, but simply it's empowerment of minorities and African- Americans, what it is. And we immediately began to work with Hispanics, immediately began to work with Native Americans, immediately began to work with groups in Mozambique and Rwanda and South Africa. And so we were moving in the direction that we were talking about it, and people who understood us and knew our history also saw that evolution.

But what was happening was in the press and with some folk around, they were just targeting in on black power. So that would kind of be an obstacle that would not allow you to go down that path in the manner that you needed to get down that path. So we had to fight that struggle with NSNC, but we did have some Snickers that went out and they concluded that we had kind of forced the whites out and didn't appreciate what they had done. I'm thinking that's unfortunate, and a lot of that has to do with how we all left SNCC

As opposed to any kind of plan of action to do that kind of thing. There were three votes. None of those votes put whites out of the organization. And then Stokely left, I left, and some other folk left. And then we are talking about 1969. Then there is a vote, say that all whites have to go, but by that time, it's none there. And even at the time when the first discussion came up, there weren't a lot of whites there because a number of whites who had been involved understood that it was important. If you're talking about creating the beloved community and that beloved community is going to be made up of whites and blacks, then somebody has to organize a white community. All we are doing is organizing an African-American community. That's all we did from 1961 all the way through to 1968. So let's be real. Don't tell me that we don't have that. Not unless somebody's going to go over there now, I can't. Okay, now I can train and help and let you work as an understudy and get all the skills and all that kind of stuff, but at some point you have to go and do that kind of thing.

That hadn't happened to this day. I mean, you had some instances where you had mobilization, but you haven't had organizing of fundamental communities of whites who saw the similar interests that African-Americans experienced. Now, you can go to places like West Virginia and they know about food stamps. So when people are referring to the food stamp recipients as being less than, they feel that pain. But you have to organize folks so they know that you have to bring those interests together without having that color thing, which has divided us for centuries, being the booga bear to keep you from actually bringing those interests together.

Faulkenbury:

Right. So within SNC, when the debate is intensifying over whether whites should remain in the organization or not, there was that case when Bob Zellner, I think wanted to organize whites in New Orleans, but that was met with some fierce resistance. Did that event and then larger events around that, I guess that was in maybe 67 or 68 or maybe 67.

Sellers:

68

Faulkenbury:

Was it later? Was it

Sellers:

68?

Faulkenbury:

Was that sort of more of the dividing line?

Sellers:

That was the dividing line when Bob made that statement. It probably was Bob, Jack Minnis, Bob's wife, Dottie, and maybe one or two people in SNCC at that

Faulkenbury:

Point. Yeah, that's about it.

Sellers:

That was it. And the group SNCC, by 1968 was tattered and worn, had pushed the accelerator to the floor to get to 1968 in terms of the SNCC folk came out against the war against Vietnam, the black power then Apartheid and South Africa took on some of the critical issues around the world, even took a statement in supportive of Palestine of the two state kind of thing, just and so

Faulkenbury:

The donors are gone.

Sellers:

Yeah. Yeah, donors gone. But also you have about moved the movement as far as you're going to be able to do without, because they're already arresting, they're already drafting. And so it's just a point where they kind of pick us off. And there are a lot of people who are just fatigued. You couldn't go through this kind of intensity over a year without losing something. And it wasn't just your hair, it was your whole mindset. And we recognize that. We recognize that almost instantly after Vietnam. But we take credit for Dr. King a year later coming out against the war in Vietnam. And we worked on it. We just talked to him and we talked about the moral character of the movement, and he had a moral obligation, if nothing else.

Faulkenbury:

And there was a connection made on the Meredith March, wasn't there?

Sellers:

Oh, yeah. There was a connection made on the Meredith March, but that connection always was there. I think that the press and the status quo just felt like they had to create adversaries, and they saw SNCC as that adversary. And you see on some of the historical film footage, documents, documentation, Stokely standing right next to Dr. King,

They said that they didn't agree on some tactics, and they kept on marching together. They often kept on down the road, but that's always the case. The difference between C and SELC, if you want to talk about organizational differences, is that SNCC believed in organizing. SELC operated on mobilizing. So if they wanted to raise an issue, they would mobilize a march on Washington. They would mobilized the Selma in Montgomery, and if SNCC wanted to have a issue on the right to vote and inclusion in the political process, they would organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which is still semblance of, that are still in existence in Mississippi today. Certainly at the beginning of the nineties or the mid nineties, there were more black elected officials in Mississippi than anywhere else in the world.

So that would be the difference. And we recognize that. And SNCC had a real appreciation for many of the organizers in SCLC, James Orange, and there were times when James Bevel would get out and could actually organize and mobilize students, but there were a number of people who had that kind of relationship. And Dr. King had a fondness for Willie Ricks, who was the person who actually kind of coined the phrase and say, stoke the, okay, here's our time. You need to go with this. And Dr. Key and Dr. King had a really, really, really interesting relationship. Dr. King wanted to talk to somebody from SNCC. He'd call Willie Ricks. Willie Ricks wanted to go over and talk to Dr. King. He would go over and walk right on in, threw everybody back in the back into his office, said, Hey, how you doing? I don't care what the circumstances were. He said, Hey, Willie Ricks, how you doing? And that kind of relationship was the kind of standing relationship. We had more time on the Mississippi Meredith March to kind of talk

Through that whole thing. And so whenever you have the time on a campaign, that's when you can let everything down and just talk as human beings. In Alabama, we had some in Selma, we had some conflicting, I think, ideas about the Selma to Montgomery march. We did not know that there had already been a strategy to develop between Dr. King and Lyndon Ba Johnson owed the Voter Rights Act. If you can get this done, then we'll step in. But it came after the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and SNCC had already voted about a month before that that they would not be involved in the Selma march. And John Lewis said that as an individual, he wanted to march, which caused a lot of confusion and was the critical piece for John not getting elected the second time. And so some of that is missed because the press intentionally misleaded. So when we got involved in it, after John went down, then SCLC wasn't ready to turn over any of the strategic kinds of notes to us. So when they went out and tried to redo the march and they got on the other side of the bridge, I think knelt down and turned around and came back, people felt betrayed that we didn't know that that was as far as he was supposed to go.

And so there began some antagonisms around that. But that's just tactical antagonism. That's not personal antagonism. And some people chose to take things out of context in terms of we had discussions and talks and we would say, Deloitte, that would be Dr. King or De King. And people saw that as being demeaning for us. It was amusing, and it was fantastic. We talked about the oratory and orator skills, and the Lord has shaken this earth again. I mean, he just got 'em going. And so people would hear that, reporters would hear that and say, oh, they're being derogatory toward Dr. King. No, we were being very affectionate about Dr. King. And he knew, I mean, it wasn't a question that he didn't know. We'd say that to him. The Lord has arrived.

Faulkenbury:

And you would laugh.

Sellers:

He'd laugh and say, all right now, all right, now I don't like that kind of stuff. But that would be it.

And the other part of that is that sometimes people took that laughter as in some kind of way insulting or demeaning, but we always tried to find ways in which we could find something to laugh at. Because if you didn't, you'd be crying all the time, all the tragedies, all the disasters, all the things that are going on around you. So it was often, and in that laughter you have in that fun part of that, you would always say something that's comical about somebody else. You say, Dr. King, after we went over to Philadelphia during the Mississippi Meredith march, and he got back in the car with Reverend Abernathy. Reverend Abernathy was supposed to say the prayer. And when he was saying the prayer, somebody standing behind him, he was talking about, I pray for those sinners who killed my brothers. That peace unto them, somebody behind him said, and we are standing behind you and Abernathy's eyes open up.

So all the way back, Dr. King told him that Baptist preachers don't pray with the eyes open. And that was a funny kind of joke. It is truism. He said, well, were you scared? Oh, no, I wasn't scared. So I heard that man back there telling you that I was standing behind. You. See, you got a little word there. You might even turned around and looked back at him, say you were scared. That's what that was. And so everybody fall out and laugh. And it sounds like you're demeaning him by doing that kind of thing. But that was very common kind of posturing that would go on. It was harmless, it was not demeaning and V and those kinds of things. And so you would find SCLC and Snickers using that kind of language and dialogue and discussion. We usually had very traditional kinds of lengths and communication.

So I can't say what happens in Mississippi with the staff, but when we went to Mississippi with the Mississippi Meredith March, we took essentially staff that had been in Mississippi all the time. So we just facilitated that communication link. And once we did that, there were no problems at all. Absolutely none. We had an opportunity to work with the organizers. They came in to help with the march going down the road. We had our own people over there to help with the march going down the road. Dr. King started staying out at night in those respites, and he actually left sometimes to go and try to raise some money. And we weren't opposed to that because those funds were going to help us have a successful march in Mississippi. But he was there most of the time, and he was open, and you could see that sometimes he was embarrassed by the celebrity

That he represented. And I mean, people were, he was humble, and people were very kind of supportive. And it was a once in a lifetime opportunity to actually see him up close. And so they would, let me wash your feet, let me kiss your feet, all that kind of stuff. And that made him feel very uneasy. So we would try to slide in and say, Hey, look, if you have an orange or an apple, we'll give it to him and we'll put it aside for him. If you have some water, cold water, we'll give him a cup of water. Just pull the cup in. If you want us to take the job, you'll take the job. But said, you can go up and you can actually see him and shake his hand if you have to touch him, pat him on the shoulder or something. But we gone. We got to go. So we can't be here alone. And people felt very good having that opportunity. They didn't know what to do. This is out of their biblical reading where the Messiah, and see, when I use that term, for me, it's kind of comical,

But it has the same kind of biblical reference. The Messiah showed up and I had a chance to touch him of his garment. And people remembered that throughout their lives about the fact that even though they were way down in low Mississippi and they were really struggling and suffering, that there were still hope that a Dr. King would actually come down and say hello to them.

Because what they saw, he was there in a group, and it was a lot of other people, local people around, but it was them that he came to see, and it was him that they saw. And so that was the way that is. So we continued to roll after that period of time because it became very obvious that COINTELPRO was in full operation. So you had to stay clear all of that. And then we had to find a way to keep Stokely alive as best we could. And so there were security precautions and different kinds of things we would used for that. And we had to make sure that we had a clear message, a singular message. And because after a while when John was defeated by Stokely, John went out with another message about SNCC being off message now. So we had to make sure that the message inside SNCC was consistent. And we tried to do that. And then we had a situation where a group of people on what was called the Atlanta Project, decided to articulate Foric what black power meant. And it was, if you read that statement, which was never approved, that that statement was never entered as an agenda item in a SNCC meeting, but it was sent to the New York Times. And the New York Times published it as an official position. And then we are fighting now to certainly really keep control of the message.

And so we really kind of tightened down on that and try to ask people to refrain from having comments in that kind of fashion that we'd have to go through the appropriate channels so that our message is clear. And so we are not drowned out, our voice is not drowned out because we are actually pulling these pieces together as we go along. And I told you that I go to California to meet with Cesar Chavez and the great pickers and bringing them into the fold. And then we go to Chicago and the Hispanic Puerto Rican community and the Puerto Rican independent movements, Dr that goes to Puerto Rico and then the Cuba. And so we are closing that gap, and then we go to South Dakota with the aim and the American Indian movement. And so we are fashioning all of these associations and relationships

As we move further along. And we got these people still bashing us over the head about, we put white people out and all that kind of stuff. And my thing is, is that we don't want to even address that anymore. Let's address these other kinds of things in a meaningful manner. We don't have to do it through the press, but Bella Coast, and I forget their names, means, and what's the other one's name? All a part of the American Indian movement. And from then on, every time we would have an activity, whatever it is, African Liberation Day or any of those kinds of things, we'd ask the coalition to come together and support that. If we had a position that we were coming out with, we wanted them to support that. If they had something going on, we were there to support those things. And then you get to about 1969 and everything closes down and shuts down,

Copyright © Cleveland Sellers & Evan Faulkenbury. 2013

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