The son of Cleveland and Pauline Taggart Sellers, Cleveland L. Sellers, Jr. was born in 1944 in Denmark, S.C., where his father was a businessman and his mother worked as a teacher at the South Carolina Area Trade School. Sellers attended local schools and started a student chapter of the NAACP. He attended Howard University and worked with the Student Non Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in various civil rights causes around the south and was elected Program Secretary in 1965. In 1967, while organizing students at South Carolina State University, Sellers was shot in a melee that later became known as the Orangeburg Massacre. Three students died, and many were wounded; Sellers alone was indicted and convicted for inciting a riot and served time in jail, as he had for resisting the draft, a case that was later dismissed. In 1969, Sellers taught a black ideology course at Cornell University and later received a Master's Degree from Harvard University. Living in North Carolina, he worked for the city of Greensboro in the Human Resources Department and later as a Housing Administrator; he became involved in many North Carolina related civil rights and black consciousness projects, including Malcolm X. Liberation University. He worked in Jesse Jackson's 1984 and 1988 Presidential Campaigns and received his Ed. D. from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro in education administration in 1987. He was pardoned for his conviction in the Orangeburg Massacre in 1993, and went on to become Director of African American Studies at the University of South Carolina.
From the description of Cleveland L. Sellers, Jr. papers, 1934-2003 (bulk 1960-1980). (College of Charleston). WorldCat record id: 69405052
