Cleveland L. Sellers Jr.
Educator and civil rights activist
Cleveland L. Sellers, Jr. (1944- ) is a native of Denmark, South Carolina and attended Howard University in Washington, D.C. Sellers served as the program director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), organizing protests, marches and sit-ins around the South. In 1968, while organizing students at South Carolina State University, he was wounded when SC Highway Patrol officers opened fire on student activists who were protesting continued segregation in Orangeburg. The officers killed three students and injured many more in what became known as the Orangeburg Massacre. Sellers was the only protester who was arrested and spent seven months in jail. Sellers was pardoned in 1993 and later served as a professor at the University of South Carolina and as president of Voorhees College.
Image courtesy of Cleveland Sellers