Cleveland Sellers
| Cleveland Sellers | |
|---|---|
.jpg) |
|
| Born |
November 8, 1944 Denmark, South Carolina, USA |
| Movement | African-American Civil Rights Movement |
| Spouse(s) | Gwen |
Cleveland Sellers, Jr. (born November 8, 1944) is an American educator and veteran civil rights activist.
During the Civil Rights Movement, Sellers helped lead the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He was the only person convicted and jailed for events at the Orangeburg Massacre, a 1968 civil rights protest in which three students were killed by state troopers. Sellers' conviction and the acquittal of the other nine defendants was believed to be motivated by racism, and Sellers received a full pardon 25 years after the incident.
Sellers is the former Director of the African American Studies Program at the University of South Carolina. He served as president of Voorhees College, a historically black college in South Carolina, from 2008 to 2015.
Sellers was born in Denmark, South Carolina, to Cleveland Sellers (Sr.) and Pauline Sellers. He began attending the Voorhees School when he was 3 and served as its mascot. He attended Voorhees from ninth through 12th grades, graduating in 1962. During his boyhood, Sellers joined the Boy Scouts of America and attended the 1960 National Scout jamboree in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Although Sellers completed the requirements necessary to become an Eagle Scout, "his paperwork was lost" and he was not formally recognized with the honor until December 3, 2007, at 64 years of age, more than four decades after it was earned. Sellers was presented with a historically correct Eagle Scout medal that would have been awarded in the 1960s at a special Eagle Scout Court of Honor at the 2010 Centennial National Scout Jamboree.
In 1960, in response to the Greensboro sit-ins, Sellers organized a sit-in protest at a Denmark, South Carolina lunch counter. At the age of 15, he was active for the first time with the Civil Rights movement.
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