THE RIVER OF NO RETURN

THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A BLACK MILITANT AND THE LIFE AND DEATH OF SNCC

by Cleveland and Robert Terrell Sellers ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 22, 1972

This rather unreflective but brilliantly descriptive memoir by a 28 year-old black activist spans the growth of the civil fights movement and the rise of "black consciousness." Sellers came from a comfortable home in a South Carolina town with a stable, independent black middle class. At Howard University he met Stokely Carmichael and got involved in SNCC, not as a nonviolent integrationist, but an avowed militant. He describes the Cambridge, Maryland upheavals of 1964, the voter-registration drives in Mississippi, hunting for the bodies of Goodman, Schwerner and Chancy, the disastrous Montgomery march, the tempest over SNCC's "black power" slogan, and the Orangeburg massacre of 1968 when Sellers was shot and jailed. The persecution sustained by SNCC was truly horrifying, and Sellers provides a powerful sense of the experience, without "as told to" artificialities. He also sketches the factional alignments and organizational debates as uncertainty deepened over long-term strategy and the decision to exclude whites from SNCC. He was generally in Carmichael's faction, on the side of the practical "hardliners" against the "Freedom-High Floaters." But the policy differences remain frustratingly vague, and there is too little analysis of why SNCC was unable to broaden its support. Still uncertain how to reach the black masses, Sellers has now joined Carmichael's advocacy of "Pan-Africanism." Veterans of "the Movement" will seize upon the cameos of James Forman, Julian Bond, Rap Brown, and others. There is no sentimentality or nostalgia, though--it's a dead serious account of life-and-death times.

Pub Date: Feb. 22, 1972

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Morrow

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1972

Categories: NONFICTION