My name is Nxslp (pronounced “no sleep’). My father, Cleveland Sellers, Jr., was shot in the arm that day, convicted for inciting a riot, and served seven months in prison. He was subsequently imprisoned as a result of that night’s violence. (Taylor’s death is now being These things would be familiar to my father so many decades ago in America, but this is also the world into which I am delivering my children, who are black.To be black in America is to live a life bookended by traumatic experiences.My father’s American experience was shaped by the visible and concealed wounds he suffered during the Orangeburg Massacre. Sellers was shot during the Orangeburg Massacre on Feb. 8, 1968, when three students were killed and 27 injured during a S.C. State University protest against a segregated bowling alley. What is your background / nationality? Twenty-seven others were wounded. He detailed how his father was made a scapegoat in the situation, charged with 5 felony counts and convicted of rioting, while the officers who killed three men were found not guilty on all charges. (Photo courtesy of Bakari Sellers.)
Moments that leave me jarred, knowing the country I love dearly fails to treat with mercy, humanity, and empathy people who look like me.Now, the disregard that is commonplace in the black American experience is being revealed through the recovery efforts for the coronavirus pandemic.Despite how clear and demonstrable these inequalities are in America, they are still not universally acknowledged — even amid a global health pandemic that isBut how could this acknowledgment possibly exist in an environment where black suffering simply does not get the attention it deserves?If America is going to right the course and live up to its true potential, racial disparities and the sorrow of black America must be nationally acknowledged.The stakes are too high to sit on the sideline. Our generation desperately needs another Julian Bond, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, and Jesse Jackson.The pain and sorrow of black Americans is not only real, but it has authored the true story of America.
Author and political analyst Bakari Sellers joins Matt Galloway to discuss why the struggle for Black freedom isn't over. I’m from Philadelphia, PA and I come from a, mainly, Latino background. Who are you? On February 8, 1968, three South Carolina State University students were killed by State Highway Patrol Troopers during a campus protest. I am a true child of the Civil Rights Movement.But now that I am a father, it is disappointing to see the vitriol and racism that my father tried so hard to eradicate looming over the next generation.In just a few weeks we have learned of the killing of two black men: We have also learned of the white woman who called the cops and falsely said she was being threatened by Christian Cooper, a black man, in Central Park, after the man, who was birdwatching, calmly asked her to leash her dog as required. To hear more, including going to watch the prison be torn down, hit the above clip.Get Bakari’s new book ‘My Vanishing Country’ – https://amzn.to/2AkBQwfIntroduce yourself. State troopers shot into a crowd of students from the historically black school who were protesting segregation, killing three young black men and injuring dozens more, including Cleveland Sellers. But what the public fails to understand is the perpetual trauma deepened by sinister events that happened before my father’s, like the lynching ofYet, despite the 40-year age difference between me and my father, the patterns of perpetual trauma persist through the violence against the black community that has defined my own American experience — from Mike Brown, Walter Scott, and the slaughter that commenced during Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (also known as Mother Emanuel).These are just a few of the moments that are forever imprinted on my life. When she refused, Cooper said, in a Facebook post about the incident, that There is video of each incident — thank God. In this clip, Bakari Sellers speaks about his father Cleveland’s role in the Orangeburg Massacre in South Carolina, which is the most-deadly civil rights protest in history. He detailed how his father was made a scapegoat in the situation, charged with 5 felony counts and convicted of rioting, while the officers who killed three men were found not guilty on all charges. As a result, I grew up adulating the brave students in Orangeburg who suffered bullets for the pursuit of racial justice. And you don’t have to be another Martin Luther King Jr. to have an impact. In this clip, Bakari Sellers speaks about his father Cleveland’s role in the Orangeburg Massacre in South Carolina, which is the most-deadly civil rights protest in history.
Where are you from? And though it took place 16 years before I was born, it remains the most important day in my life. Bakari Sellers joins the program. Sellers' memoir "My Vanishing Country" will be released on May 19. This dark day is known by many, but not enough, as the Orangeburg Massacre.