Civil Rights Activism
In 1962 Sellers enrolled in Howard University. After the 1960 protest, Sellers' father had forbidden his son's jeopardizing himself by becoming an activist. However, during his sophomore year, Sellers became involved with SNCC. He worked on voter registration drives in Mississippi, and was the director of the Holly Springs COFO office during Mississippi Freedom Summer. A significant amount of material on this period may be found in the Mississippi Digital Library. In 1965 he became the program director of SNCC. In the summer of 1966, when Sellers heard of the attempted murder of James Meredith, he joined other civil rights campaigners, including SCLC's Martin Luther King, SNCC's Stokely Carmichael and Floyd McKissick in the march across Mississippi.
After the march, Sellers was with Carmichael when the term “black power” was first used. He was also one of the first members of SNCC to refuse to be drafted into the U.S. military as a protest against the Vietnam War. The leadership of SNCC thought that the Johnson Administration was trying to silence SNCC by drafting its leadership. Sellers graduated from Howard in 1967. After graduation, he returned to South Carolina.
Read more about this topic: Cleveland Sellers
Famous quotes containing the words civil rights, civil and/or rights:
“The common goal of 22 million Afro-Americans is respect as human beings, the God-given right to be a human being. Our common goal is to obtain the human rights that America has been denying us. We can never get civil rights in America until our human rights are first restored. We will never be recognized as citizens there until we are first recognized as humans.”
—Malcolm X (1925–1965)
“...I was confronted with a virile idealism, an awareness of what man must have for manliness, dignity, and inner liberty which, by contrast, made me see how easy living had made my own group into childishly unthinking people. The Negro’s struggles and despairs have been like fertilizer in the fields of his humanity, while we, like protected children with all our basic needs supplied, have given our attention to superficialities.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 19 (1962)
“The demand for equal rights in every vocation of life is just and fair; but, after all, the most vital right is the right to love and be loved.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)