Cleveland Sellers, 48 years after the Orangeburg Massacre

A bipartisan group of some two dozen members of Congress will travel to Orangeburg, South Carolina, this weekend to pay tribute to those who were killed and injured by state law enforcement officers during a civil rights demonstration there 48 years ago. The pilgrimage, organized by the Faith and Politics Institute, will be led by Rep. James E. Clyburn and Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, along with civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis of Georgia. The group will also make stops in Columbia and in Charleston, site of the mass shooting last year at the historic Mother Emanuel AME Church.

I recommend that these members of Congress prepare by reading The River of No Return. It’s the autobiography of Cleveland L. Sellers Jr., a survivor of what has become known as the Orangeburg Massacre and a quiet but powerful leader of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. John Dittmer, author of the award-winning Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi, has called Sellers’s book “one of the two or three most important books to come out of the civil rights movement.”

Sellers, now 71 years old, is the president of Voorhees College in Denmark, South Carolina—one of two historically black colleges affiliated with the Episcopal Church. After eight years in the post, he will be retiring at the end of the current academic year.