cover image Outside Agitator: The Civil Rights Struggle of Cleveland Sellers Jr.

Outside Agitator: The Civil Rights Struggle of Cleveland Sellers Jr.

Adam Parker. Hub City, $18 trade paper (240p) ISBN 978-1-938235-45-0

Journalist Parker respectfully and accessibly tells the life story of civil rights activist Cleveland Sellers. Sellers, born in 1944, was a 10-year-old in a middle-class South Carolina black family when Emmett Till was murdered in Mississippi; as a college student, he found his calling in life as a civil rights activist. Deeply involved in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he was both foot soldier and officer, a deeply committed witness to and hands-on participant in historic moments of the civil rights movement, such as the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project and the Selma to Montgomery march. In 1968, when students at South Carolina State University protested a local segregated bowling alley, they were met with state troopers, at whose hands three black students were killed. The only person charged in the aftermath of what became known as the Orangeburg Massacre was Sellers, who, though later exonerated, was convicted of rioting and served a seven-month sentence . In the decades that followed, Sellers lived in North Carolina, continued organizing, completed his bachelor’s degree, fathered two children, added master’s and doctoral degrees to his portfolio, and ultimately became a professor of African-American studies and president of Voorhees College in South Carolina. A biography of a man who “does not seek the spotlight [but] is content behind the scenes,” this is a worthy addition to the record of the civil rights movement. [em](Nov.) [/em]