Author of the week

Bakari Sellers

“Bakari Sellers’ story is black America’s story,” said Michael Harriot in TheRoot .com. Though he is the son of a civil rights hero and a former political wunderkind, the 35-year-old writer, lawyer, and CNN analyst is before all that a child of the South, as are most black Americans. And he is a child of a rural black town in the South, a region that remains home to all but one of the nation’s 106 majority-black counties. With his new memoir, My Vanishing Country, he asks that the nation not lose sight of the many black Americans who share his regional background. “The media, when they say rural, they mean white people,” he says. “But I’m rural, too. The Black Belt is our roots. And the plights that we go through have, many times, been forgotten.”

Sellers is also unusually open about the accumulating trauma of being black in America, said Michel Martin in NPR.org. Sixteen years before he was born, his father, Cleveland Sellers, was one of 29 civil rights demonstrators shot by police on the campus of South Carolina State University. Three black students died, the nine officers charged were acquitted, and the elder Sellers—then a 24-year-old activist—was the only person imprisoned in the aftermath. Bakari Sellers says that event shaped his own life like no other, because he has forever wanted to carry on his father’s commitment to ending such injustices, to helping black Americans live free of fear. At the same time, he forever sees that effort failing as racism again and again takes more lives. “We have made a lot of progress,” he says, “but we still have so far to go.”