Aaron Sellers
8-Jan-1914
2-Nov-2008
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Aaron Sellers
8-Jan-1914 2-Nov-2008 |
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Aaron Sellers, the father of Civil
Rights in Bullock County, was only 40 when he summoned the courage and tenacity
he needed to make a difference in his life and others in 1954. Dr. Charles G.
Gomillion, a Tuskegee Institute Professor, called Sellers out of the plowing
fields to aide the African American citizens of Bullock and the State of Alabama
in the voting rights struggle. Sellers organized the Bullock County NAACP at Oak
Grove No 1 Baptist church in Midway and served as its first president.
On January 18, 1954, Sellers lead his first organized attempt to register
African Americans to vote at the Bullock County Courthouse. Sellers made 6
attempts to register and each time was prohibited. His story is documented in
Robert A. Caro’s book, The
Years of Lyndon Johnson Master of the Senate.
In December, 1958 Sellers testified before the Federal Civil Rights Commission
hearing held in Montgomery, Alabama where he was asked, “Mr. Sellers, you going
to continue to attempt to vote?” Sellers replied, “Yes, I’m determined to
register.” President Lyndon Johnson had Sellers secretly brought to Washington
to have input on the Civil Rights Act that was signed into law in 1964. Aaron
Sellers registered to vote in 1965.
Below is an excerpt from a transcript of a program of Mr. Caro speaking on his
conversation when he finally got to meet Aaron Sellers, most of the people
involved earlier had passed on and only a few were left living for him to find
to interview when he was writing his book. The following excerpt from him at a
speaking engagement in 2003 at Harvard University in the John F. Kennedy School
of Government for the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press and Politics for Public
Policy.
"...So what I was doing was simply going through the
list of witnesses at these hearings and trying to locate them and talk to them,
those that were still alive. Of course it was already forty years since they had
testified and a lot of them weren’t alive. And it was after I started talking to
them that I began to understand the depth of the problem and the nobility of
what Lyndon Johnson had done. I began to understand aspects I had never really
gotten.
I remember talking to a black man named Aaron Sellers who during the 1950s had
registered black votes, in Bullock County, Alabama. It was a one-sided
conversation. Mr. Sellers by this time was completely deaf, so he couldn’t hear
my questions. Luckily his daughter, Gladys Sellers, was visiting
from Washington Heights in Manhattan. So I would ask her the question and she
would tell Aaron, her father, the question, and he would talk
to me. And when I asked why he had been able to get people registered and then
they wouldn’t vote, he said, “well, the white people in town kept
a list of the names of who was trying to vote, and they kept the list in their
pockets for ready reference.
So I said, what would they use the list for? and I started to get a real
education. I can’t tell you about it all tonight. I’ll tell you just about crop
loans. People who were on that list couldn’t get crop loans, and if you were a
poor farmer in the South, you needed in the spring, a loan from a bank to
buy your seeds and fertilizer to plant your crops. In Bullock County it was
cotton and peanuts. Without that loan you couldn’t plant a crop for the next
year, you wouldn’t have a harvest to sell, you wouldn’t have any income coming
in. You would have to pack up your wife and children in many cases, get into
your rundown car and drive off, often with no place to go. If you wanted to vote
in the South, that was something that was facing you."
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