Rider program part of Black History Month series
By Lea Kahn, Staff Writer
Hope and change are the watchwords of this generation, and without hope, there can be no change.
That was the message delivered by Bakari Sellers, the youngest black state legislator in the United States.
The 25-year-old Mr. Sellers, a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives, spoke to more than 60 Rider University students and staff at the Bart Luedeke Student Center on Monday night.
“The question posed for today’s discussion is in two parts — how far have we come, and where do we go from here,” said Mr. Sellers, whose keynote speech kicked off Rider’s Black History Month celebration.
The answer to the first question is “pretty straightforward — not far enough,” Mr. Sellers said.
There has been progress in the last 40 or so years since the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated, but not enough, he said.
While blacks have taken great strides toward equality, Mr. Sellers said, he does not believe that when Barack Obama was sworn into office as the 44th president of the United States, “we all entered the promised land.”
“Let me be clear. Regardless of what you have heard on cable news, this is not a ‘post-racial’ America,” he said, adding that, nevertheless, watching Mr. Obama take the oath of office was a landmark moment.
Mr. Sellers said he watched the inauguration in Washington last year, but what impressed him most were the tears on people’s faces and the peace they felt for that moment.
“It was as if, for that second, my father’s generation was able to collectively remove history’s burden from their backs and, laying them down in the dust, take in a full breath of freedom and exhale,” Mr. Sellers said.
“For my father, as for most of his generation, the civil rights movement isn’t some vague abstraction or a chapter in our history books. For him, it is a very real memory thick with the smell of a jailhouse floor and gun smoke. For him, the scars still sting.”
Mr. Sellers’ father, Cleveland Sellers, was present at a civil rights demonstration outside a whites-only bowling alley in Orangeburg, S.C., in 1968. The elder Mr. Sellers was an organizer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Students at South Carolina State University, who had protested at the bowling alley, returned to the school, built a bonfire and sang protest songs, Mr. Sellers said. But then South Carolina Highway Patrol troopers, who had taken positions on an embankment outside the school, opened fire — killing three students and wounding 27 others.
“The night of hope and change had turned to desperation and despair. The faith of freedom songs had turned to screams,” Mr. Sellers said.
There are many people who would like to believe President Obama’s election has washed away the bloodstains, and Americans have moved beyond a difficult period in the country’s history, he said.
“They tell us that we are living in a post-racial age,” he said. “(But) we must realize that by electing the first black president, we were not bringing an end to racism. We were bringing the discussion out into the open. We have taken another step toward Dr. King’s ‘Promised Land,’ but we aren’t there yet.”
Mr. Sellers pointed to the comments made by South Carolina Lt. Gov. Andre Bauer, who compared providing welfare assistance to feeding a stray dog — something that should not be done because “stray animals breed.”
“We are witnessing the rise of a new, more insidious, wounded racism masquerading as legitimate public discourse” that pretends its opposition to America’s continued evolution is political — not personal, he said.
But it is personal when U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., threatens to turn debate over how to provide health care to every American into a “Waterloo” so he can “break” President Obama, Mr. Sellers said.
While those incidents were upsetting to him, Mr. Sellers said, it was different for his father. His father still remembers the state troopers with shotguns and the gunshots and the cries of the injured.
“My father has tragedy to live with where I have a choice. This generation has a choice,” he said, despite the continuing racism that is mostly a symptom of the larger problem, which is poverty.
Blacks are 60 percent less likely than whites to earn a college degree and 42 percent less likely to have health insurance, but they are 447 percent more likely to go to prison and 521 percent more likely to be murdered. said Mr. Sellers.
Those disparities are tied to the fact almost 25 percent of blacks live below the poverty line as compared to 8.6 percent of whites, Mr. Sellers said. If poverty could be eliminated, then all of the other inequities would fall away, he said.
“I still believe in hope because, as tough as it gets, we have to stay vigilant, and we have to stay optimistic,” he said. “We have to stay hopeful because that’s the only way to overcome hopelessness.”
Mr. Sellers said when he thinks back to President Obama’s inauguration, what he remembers most is his own father’s smile — not because electing a black president would wipe away hate and racism, but because it would bring hope.
“My father is an apostle of hope, and so am I,” Mr. Sellers said. “That’s why I come to places like this to talk with you because I know if we want to see a ‘post-racial’ America in our lifetimes, it is up to us.”
“We are the only ones who can answer that second question — ‘Where do we go from here?’ This generation is blessed with opportunities that (the previous generation) could have barely imagined.”
“So it is our duty to build our America with our own hands,” Mr. Sellers said. “I believe we will rise to that challenge.”
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