Bakari Sellers

HOOVER: What Is It Like To Be A Young, Black Man Fighting For Justice Today? This Week, On Firing Line.

VO: As Demonstrations Erupt Against Police Brutality Across The Country, Activist and Author Bakari Sellers is Speaking about issues he has focused On His Entire Life

SELLERS:  It’s Hard Being Black In This Country When Your Life Is Not Valued. 

VO: Sellers’ Father Was Shot And Wounded By Police In The Orangeburg Massacre Of 1968.

SELLERS: It’s Physically Painful To Think About That Night, So Ripe With Potential And Possibility Erupting Into Violence And Tragedy And Loss.

VO: A Legacy That Set The Trajectory For Sellers Life, Inspiring Him To Run Successfully For Office At the age of 21. 

SELLERS: Look At Where I’m Standing Now In Just One Generation.  It’s The Agitator’s Son Who Became A Legislator, Then A Nominee For Lieutenant Governor And Now An Analyst For Largest News Organization In America. 

HOOVER: With The Nation In Crisis, What Does Bakari Sellers Say Now?

ANNOUNCER: Firing Line with Margaret Hoover is made possible by the Margaret and Daniel Loeb Foundation. Robert Graneiri through the Vanguard Donor Advised Fund, the David Tepper Charitable Foundation Inc. The Asness Family Foundation. The Kahng Foundation. Additional funding is provided by. Corporate funding is provided by Stephens Inc.

HOOVER: Bakari Sellers, welcome to Firing Line. 

SELLERS: Thank you so much for having me. 

HOOVER: You are joining me here in Charleston, South Carolina, your home state. 

SELLERS: Yes.

HOOVER: Where at the ripe age of 21 years old you were elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives and became the youngest member in the history of the state to serve in that body. 

SELLERS: It seems like so far ago, so long ago. But in 2006, June 13th, I’ll never forget, I became the youngest black elected official in the country. I was 21 years old and I beat someone who was 82 years old and had been in office for 26 years, which was longer than I had been born. 

HOOVER: You are also a CNN commentator and you’re the author of a New York Times best seller, My Vanishing Country. And it details not just your personal history, but the history of your family and the civil rights struggles in the generation before you and of your own call to politics and political activism. It has been now three weeks that the United States has been grappling in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd at the hands of a white police officer. And I want to know if this moment feels different to you than it did in the wake of the Ferguson death of Michael Brown? And do you feel that something has changed in terms of how the country has responded to that death? 

SELLERS: Well, I have to say that I’m extremely hopeful. And I’m faithful. A lot of that has to do with my maturation in having twins now. And a 15 year old daughter. And wanting to have a better America for them than the one we have currently. So that’s where my hope resides. However, we’ve been here before, Margaret. I mean, 1955, with the death of Emmett Till. The country  stopped and mourned and saw what racism and bigotry had done to this young black boy in Mississippi. We saw it on the Edmund Pettus Bridge when we had the dogs and the water hoses that were used against people like John Lewis when they were marching for freedom in Selma. We saw it — a moment like this just recently, five years ago in Charleston after the death of my good friend Clementa Pinckney and eight others. And here we are at this moment again. And we’re the country, the world is watching. However, my fear is that we’ll miss this moment. We missed that moment before. And my fear is that we’ll miss this moment to have real substantive change in rooting out the systemic racism that plagues this country today. 

HOOVER: Take the Black Lives Matter movement. Do you think that the Black Lives Matter movement five years ago felt different than it does today. 

SELLERS: Well, it feels different because we have Taylor Swift who was uttering the words. Because we have Mitt Romney who is uttering the words. And for me, I give them so much credit. Carson Wentz, I give him so much credit for coming out. Trevor Lawrence. I’m a huge Gamecock fan, here in South Carolina and here I am giving props to the Clemson quarterback for coming out and saying that black lives do matter, that he believes in the equality of his brothers. However, we have to make justice in this country a verb. It’s not just a noun. But what happens next? You know, this week, we just put George Floyd in the ground  and so I’m not as concerned about what we’ve done up to this point. That’s been different. But is there follow through over the next couple weeks? 

HOOVER: So it’s about, is there enough political capital to make real change so that it will be lasting? 

SELLERS: Is there enough political capital to make real change that’s going to be lasting and change the systems in this country which has plagued us for decades if not centuries. 

HOOVER: I want to point you to one of the first lines of the book. February 8th 1968 was one of the most important days of my life. Even though it was 16 years before I was born. 

SELLERS: Yes. 

HOOVER: What happened that day? 

SELLERS: February 8, 1968, My father was shot along with 28 others on the campus of South Carolina State University. Three young men killed in men, Samuel Hammond Jr., Henry Ezekial Smith and Delano Middleton. They were protesting what the history books call ‘Jim Crow’s final hiding place,’ the last vestige of discrimination. It was in little Orangeburg, South Carolina. All the officers who fired shots for the first, and first time in this country’s history were charged with federal civil rights crimes. They were all found not guilty. My father was deemed to be an outside agitator.  He was charged, tried and convicted of rioting.

HOOVER: He is the only person who served time for what was called the 1968 Orangeburg Massacre. 

SELLERS: Correct. 

HOOVER: Which is an event, frankly, that has escaped many of the civil rights histories written about that period of time. 

SELLERS: That for me, is a lot of the pain that resides in my heart, because you have three young men who gave so much. You have my father and the blood of my family, literally running through the soil of this great country. But people don’t remember these black men who gave so much. 

And, you know, my father living with a felony until he was pardoned in the 1990s. And one of the cool things about my story is my father got pardoned, but he did not have that expunged from his record because he wanted to, he wanted to remember that he always wanted people to see that injustice.

HOOVER: By his own choice. 

SELLERS: By his own choice. How does your father feel about this time in our history? 

SELLERS: My father is excited. My father is — the movement is always burning within him and he likes to see this activism. 

HOOVER: So, does he feel there’s progress being made or there’s the potential for progress to be made?

SELLERS: My father feels there’s potential for progress being made, but he has the same level of hesitation that I do because he’s been here before. I think there is some sadness, though. I think there’s sadness on both of our parts because my 15 year old daughter was this week just out protesting at a Black Lives Matter rally. And we were having a conversation about living in a world where your fifteen year old daughter doesn’t have to go out and reaffirm that her life actually matters. That she can just be 15. And so we want to get to that point so there is some innate sadness in the country that we live in. She still has to go out and advocate and yell at the top of her lungs and write signs, simply saying that her life matters. And hopefully we can create a country where her voice is no longer needed and maybe she can just be fifteen.

HOOVER:  In 2015, right here in Charleston, South Carolina, nine African-Americans were gunned down during Bible study. The response to the Charleston massacre was a very different response than we’ve seen from almost every other massacre, right? And many from Charleston say that this typifies, not Charleston but that church. Of course, the response of the families of the parishioners was to forgive. That’s a stand and stark contrast to the protests that we’ve seen over the last several weeks and in some cases, rioting and looting that has happened. Bakari, in your view, which response gets you further politically on the back end? 

SELLERS: Well, I think both. I can’t, I will not sit here in any circumstances and condemn rioting and looting without condemning the conditions underlying that led to them. 

HOOVER: What about protesting vs. the forgiveness? 

SELLERS: What we’re actually seeing, and this is this is, this is conflicting, but I do think both are necessary. And it often times puts me in, it puts me in an interesting position because I ask the question why why are black folk in this country always in a position where we have to forgive? That’s the way that I look at that. There has never been any atonement. There’s never been any empathy or understanding. Whenever we have change in this country, whenever we have the Voting Rights Act, or the Civil Rights Act or the Fair Housing Act, whenever we have the Confederate flag come down or whenever we have policing reform, it’s always because of black blood that’s been spilled in the streets. King said the rioting is the language of the unheard. But that’s not why the change occurs. Let’s not confuse it and say that–

HOOVER: Why did the change occur?

SELLERS: The change occurs because nine people were killed in that blood flow from that church. The change is going to occur in police reform before because of George Floyd, because of Ahmaud Arbery. Because we got a chance to see that. White folk in this country did not believe not– it’s a generalization, but did not believe these type of encounters took place. But the change happened in minute two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight that his knee was on George’s neck. Because that level of inhumanity is something that people can not comprehend. And so I push back on the framing of the question, only to say that it’s not the protest that happened after and it’s not the rioting or the looting or however we want to describe it. 

HOOVER:  Or the gracious forgiveness.

SELLERS: Or the gracious forgiveness. It’s the reason we have the change is because of the black blood that flows. 

SELLERS:  But, anger is not a sin. That needs to be stated. Anger is not a sin. And for many of us who may not be as far along in our religious journey as some of those individuals who forgave. I’m still angry as hell at Dylan Roof. I still am. I still have that anger that’s harbored inside of me. Now, it’s not a paralyzing anger. Like sometimes it can be. And there still are many people in this community who have not forgiven Dylan Roof. I mean I guess what I’m telling you is that being black in this country is a perpetual state of grieving. And we go through these stages of grief. We go through seeing the video or hearing about the death, and you get this rage and anger boils over into protest, you go into this level of sadness, and then we have these memorial services where you have homecoming celebrations and it’s a celebration of life. The problem, though, Margaret, is that it’s a cycle and it continues. And so you’re asking me to have faith in a cycle that hasn’t been broken in this country yet. And that’s a blind faith. That’s what faith is. And my children make me have it, but I am going to take it one day at a time before I start handing out participation trophies.

HOOVER: In the Charleston Forum, which was the organization set up to honor the nine victims of the massacre at the AME Mother Emanuel Church. You quoted Dr. Martin Luther King and you said, “Either we’re going to build community or we’re going to succumb to chaos.” Which have we done? 

SELLERS: Well, it’s hard to to say that we are not on the brink of chaos, all you have to do is read the newspapers every day.The challenge, though, that’s my aspiration, King was very aspirational. He was a revolutionary, but he was also very aspirational. Is that we have to build community. See, that opportunity is still before us, even if we are delving into chaos. But it takes, it takes all of us. It takes me sitting here on this platform and telling you about my experiences. It takes you being able to go in different rooms that I may not be able to go in and have these challenging, very difficult conversations about race. They’re difficult, but necessary. Where you’re pushing people against their common preconceptions and notions. Where you’re telling people about stories of others and your building understanding and empathy. But it’s also it’s also this, it’s also what are we telling our children? Because I am certain that I have to have conversations with my children that are different than conversations you have to have with yours. 

HOOVER: No question.

SELLERS: And, you know, I always challenge people, what are you teaching your children and what are you showing your children by example to ensure that they give my children the benefit of their humanity? That’s all we’re asking. 

HOOVER: How old are your children?

SELLERS: I have seventeen-month-old twins and a 15-year-old daughter. 

HOOVER: How do you talk to them? How do you talk to your fifteen-year-old daughter about what she needs to know?

SELLERS:  Well, I mean, the overarching premise is when I tell her that she can be unapologetically black. That she’s loved, that she can be pride, prideful of who she is, that she has a crown above her head that she can grow into. But I also tell her things about how to stay alive.

HOOVER: Like what?

SELLERS: She has a, she has a permit now. So when you’re driving, you know, make sure that you call 911 if the sun is going down and the police are behind you. And don’t pull over unless it’s a well-lit area. Because I don’t want her to end up like Sandra Bland. You know, make sure you don’t talk, don’t reach, just don’t even if you didn’t do anything wrong. Your father wants you to live. I’m a lawyer. I can get you home, I can get you out of this situation. And so we’re very cognizant when she’s out with friends and in public. 

I know that there may be an Amy Cooper like there was for the birder in New York that comes up and bothers them or harasses them. And she’s, she has a group of friends called the Black Queens there’s four of them and they hang out together. And so I just, I want her to be very confident in who she is and also acknowledge that there are people in this world who see you as less than human. And the fact that I have to strip her of her innocence at such a young age really, really bothers me. And that is something that even though my kids are 14 years apart, 13.5 years apart, I hope we can change. I hope we can grow out of this through the conversations we’re having. 

HOOVER: Bakari, what should I tell my children?

SELLERS: So that’s something – that that’s a more important question. I appreciate the inquisitiveness of white folk these days calling me and asking me, ‘What can I do?’ I love it. Right. And then, “Oh, you have these conversations with your kids.  You know, tell me about those conversations.”  I’m more interested in the conversation your having with your kids. And the life you’re living when I’m not there. Right? Are you empowering black folk in your companies? On your shows?

SELLERS: Are you empowering black folk in your social circle? Are you treating them as equal? Are you lifting them up?  Because it’s you know, it might be okay for our generation, Margaret, but I’m more and more concerned about the generation that’s coming. I’m more concerned about our children.

HOOVER: So you’re saying actions speak louder than words. 

SELLERS: No question, because what they see in us will affect how this issue of race could still- 

HOOVER: But in the way that you tell your daughter.

HOOVER: There are some people who see her as less than, should I say that to my children too?

SELLERS: That there are-

HOOVER: That there are white people who see African Americans in this country as less than?

SELLERS: No question because we have to give them a dose of reality and a dose of truth. Because I want your, I want your kids to worry about being a change agent and not an influencer. We got way too many social media influencers and not enough change agents. And so I want my daughter to go out and carry her signs like she’s been carrying at protests and say that Black Lives Matter because knows she has- 

HOOVER: Should I be telling my kids to be out there with her?  

SELLERS: Yes. Definitely. 

I mean, that’s how this works. And this is, this is what I tell people. You’ll have no larger proponent of reproductive rights than Bakari Sellers. Right? And so when I’m out marching for reproductive rights or women’s rights or or Me Too, when I’m out there fighting for rights in the workplace, and I’m out there with all these college educated white women. 

SELLERS: Now, when George Floyd is dead. I want you marching with me. Like you can’t be selfish in the struggle. This movement is a two way street. 

HOOVER: So last night, last month, the black unemployment rate was 16 percent, compared to 12 percent of white Americans. How much do you think that plays into the protests? 

SELLERS: A lot. What we’re seeing right now is, this is, this is me putting my analyst hat on, we’re seeing something that we haven’t seen in the history of this country. We’re seeing 1968, meet 1918, with a splash of the Great Depression. 

HOOVER: With 1929? 

SELLERS: With a little bit of 1929.

HOOVER: Just did it for the Hoover didn’t you? Just for the Hoover.

SELLERS: Just a little bit, I wasn’t going to mention it. Just a little bit of ’29. And so, and what we need right now in this moment, Democrat or Republican, is leaders with empathy, compassion, understanding, and someone who has a bold vision for the future. And I’m not sure that’s what we have in the country. 

HOOVER: Let’s get to the policy solutions.

SELLERS: Sure. 

HOOVER: Because the reason you’re inclined towards public service is because you want to fix it. 

SELLERS: I love the policy part, yes.

HOOVER: Yeah and you want to fix it. So help me understand one of the major policy movements that’s coming out of the protest, which is defund the police. What does ‘defund the police’ mean to you? 

SELLERS: So what it means to me on a very personal level is that Democrats suck at messaging. That’s that’s what it means to me on a personal level. But but we we cannot we cannot lose the nuance. Defund the police doesn’t mean when you call 911 the police won’t show up. What we are advocating for are sensible budget measures. When Republicans do it, they call it trimming the fat. They call it a tax cut. So that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to trim the fat of these bloated police department budgets and actually give them to programs that will lessen the necessity for police to show up in the first place. 

HOOVER: How about automatic review of police union contracts by the Department of Justice. 

SELLERS: I want a Department of Justice that actually has some teeth and a civil rights department that actually has some teeth. And they should review this and we should actually expand the parameters for consent decrees. We should actually do things like lower the standards so that we can have federal civil rights charges against law enforcement, as in the words of Eric Holder, the reason they weren’t able to bring charges in Eric Garner is because it’s too high. We need to limit qualified immunity. We need to have a nationalized database for police misconduct because right here in Charleston you can get fired for misconduct. In my hometown of Denmark you’d be chief of police, right? So we need to make sure that we’re doing these things. And the most amazing thing about everything that I’ve suggested today, none of that’s partisan. 

HOOVER: What policy prescriptions, if you had to bet, will be the first ones that we’ll be able to get through a republican Senate and a Democratic house of representatives?

SELLERS: I do have faith in Tim Scott. I have faith in on this issue. Tim Scott understands this experience of being black from the south in this country. You asked me about going into rooms and I recall Tim Scott being stopped as a United States senator by Catholic police.

HOOVER: For driving while black. 

SELLERS: For being a United States.

HOOVER: He was walking? Was he walking? 

SELLERS: He was walking. For being a United States Senator while black. Yeah. So I, I actually have faith that he will guide with his heart on this, that that’s the Tim Scott that I know. And so I think that we’ll have solutions. I think that we can ban chokeholds. I think that we can have a database of misconduct. Do you know how many people were shot by law enforcement last year? No. Nobody knows because we don’t keep track of it. Because we need, we need a database, right? And so we have to be able, again, to actually have the data necessary to fix this issue. And I think that if you put some good people, Tim Scott, Kamalah, Corey in a room, Kirsten Gillibrand in a room, I think you can hash out some differences. 

HOOVER: one of the features of this program is that Firing Line was originally hosted by William F. Buckley Jr. and ran for thirty three years on PBS. And on that original program, William F. Buckley hosted none other than Representative Jim Clyburn. I’m going to show you a clip of what he said and then I’d like to get your take on the back end. 

CLIP: 

WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY: What you see on this (?) in the Republican Party, the party that is most enthusiastic about keeping alive those processes of upward mobility which have served an awful lot of people who came to America as as bereft as the blacks were after the 15th Amendment was passed and under the circumstances, isn’t it risky not to take advantage of a mechanism that you have seen to be historically successful? 

JAMES CLYBURN SOT: Oh, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with black people as individuals taking advantage of an individual remedy that may come from Republican Party or the Democratic Party, for that matter. But that is not to say that we ought to exclude ourselves from the activity of the party that best addresses the problems we have or the harm that’s been heaped upon the group. And so it seems to me that it’s a Democratic Party that has, as the judge said during this introduction, that has come forward with those group remedies, such as the Voting Rights Act. 

HOOVER: President Trump says that it’s his policies that are going to appeal to African Americans when it comes to the election in November. And he says that he has done more for blacks than any president since Abraham Lincoln. How do you respond? 

SELLERS: So you have to chuckle with the intellectual dishonesty. Just the fact that he went all the way back to Abraham Lincoln. That’s just fundamentally not true. My hometown of Denmark, South Carolina, what I write about in My Vanishing Country is still a food desert, where you can’t go two to three miles and get healthy fruits and vegetables. Rural hospitals, not just in South Carolina, but even in Mississippi, Alabama, are shutting down, especially in states that do not expand Medicaid. You’re drinking dirty water. You’re inhaling unclean air. And so, we have these systems of oppression. And so we have to take advantage of this moment, not just in criminal justice, but across the board. When Joe Biden said systemic racism exists in housing and environmental justice, etc., and we have to focus on that in this moment.

HOOVER: Do you support Joe Biden for president? 

SELLERS:  I support Joe Biden for president. 

HOOVER: There’s a now a deleted tweet from the President that said, “Anyone associated with the 1994 crime bill will not have a chance to be elected. In particular, African Americans will not be able to vote for you. I, on the other hand, am responsible for the criminal justice reform, which had tremendous support and helped fix the bad 1994 bill.” Will Biden’s record on the crime bill, be a vulnerability for him with African-Americans come November? 

SELLERS: No question. No question. I mean, the crime bill was ill-conceived. See, the crime bill was a bad piece of legislation. The fact, that the fact that Joe Biden and others who were part of Congress at that time refused to acknowledge the fact that it took away thousands of black men from this, from their homes. We’ve got white boys in Colorado right now making hundreds of millions of dollars selling weed, where we have people right here who get weed added onto their offenses so they go to jail for that much longer when they’ve already served ten or fifteen years? However, Joe Biden has put forth plans to attempt to fix that and remedy that through legislation. I wish there was a level of atonement. I wish there was a level of ‘I’m sorry.’ 

HOOVER: So Joe Biden has promised that he will pick a woman to be his – his running mate. How important is it that it be an African-American? 

SELLERS: I think it’s very important. And the reason being is because we have to activate the base. There are people who are watching to say, oh, Joe Biden has the black vote, they gonna show up to vote. You know what? There’s an element of truth to that. My mama is still going to vote for Joe Biden. However, if it’s Marcia Fudge or Val Demings, or Susan Rice, or Kamala Harris as VP she’s not just gonna show up to vote. She’s going to stand up every Sunday from the time they’re announced, announcing it at church. She’s gonna make sure the church van is gassed up. She’s gonna go get her cousins that don’t vote often. She’s gonna be on the phone with all her sorority sisters and the base will be activated. That’s the difference between winning and losing. Four million people voted for Barack Obama in 2012 and did not vote in 2016 – a third of which were black. And so we have to make sure we go get those million plus votes.

HOOVER: What gave you the confidence when you were 21 years old to run for the state House? 

SELLERS: Oh, it wasn’t confidence. It was insanity. You know, when you’re young, you think you’re invincible. And I ask myself those simple questions, those age old presidential questions, if not me then who and if not now then when? 

SELLERS: I really felt like my community was not even growing stagnant, but it was declining. And so I wanted to do everything I could. You know, I ran at home and my future in politics is here at home.

HOOVER: So you’ll run again?

SELLERS: I’ll run again. 

HOOVER: You write about your own anxiety. But you also write about the anxiety that plagues the black community, African American men and African American women and how you believe that that anxiety is directly tied to the trauma that men and women feel from discrimination in this country. 

SELLERS: Some people call it the ‘post-traumatic slave disorder.’ You know, I remind people often that my book is a New York Times bestseller. It’s the most amazing feeling. I think I’m the first New York Times bestseller from the big city of Denmark, South Carolina. But every time I autograph that book for somebody I’m signing a name that’s not mine. I’m signing a name of someone who literally owned my family when we came from the west coast of Africa to the coast of South Carolina. And then the images we see of Ahmaud and Breonna, the images we see of George Floyd, you can’t help but to be anxious and have some mental health issues in this country. The trick, though, is I use them as a superpower and I tell people my my fears. I’ll be honest. I wrote about it, but my fears are, are failure and death. They’re intimately tied together. And so when people ask me, what will you be doing in five or six years? It’s a difficult question for me to answer because I just make the most of every 24 hour period and the things that I can control. 

HOOVER: Bakari Sellers, thank you for coming to Firing Line

SELLERS: I’m grateful for the opportunity.

‘Firing Line with Margaret Hoover’ is made possible in part by… Corporate funding is provided by… ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪
You’re watching PBS.