Cleveland Sellers, Jr.

This short video is part of the Howard Zinn project, which consists of footage that were unusedfor the documentary Howard Zinn: You Can ́t Be Neutral on a Moving Train. This part of the footage is selected from an interview between director Denis Mueller and Cleveland Sellers , Jr.

Cleveland Sellers 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. In this part of the interview,

Sellers mainly talks about the murder of Samuel Younge Jr. Younge was a navy veteran who later joined the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC),

one of the major civil rights movement organizations, and was killed for trying to use a whites – only restroom. He was 21 years old. Sammy Younge’s death is one of the reasons SNCC became the first civil rights organization in the United States to oppose the Vietnam War, as the activists began to look at Sammy Younge, who fought

for democracy in Alabama and regions outside US. His death raised the contradiction about going around the world to fight, and the activists believed that it became

obvious that America was contradictory to the principles of democracy. They also had some concerns about the motive for waging the war and began to draw parallels between the struggle of Americans for justice and peace and equality in the South and the Vietnamese. In addition to the

interview, this video includes images and clips of Samuel Younge, murder scenes, protests and anti-war movement marches, so that viewers can get a better sense of the

background and influence of Younge’s death on the civil rights movement.