River of No Return is the autobiography of Cleveland Sellers, who got involved in the Civil Rights movement in 1960 while still a high school student living in the completely segregated town of Denmark, South Carolina. In his remarkable book he leads the reader to understand not only what it meant to be Black in this town but also, to some extent, what it meant to be White, and why the Whites in the town were so surprised when the first anti-segregation sit-in occurred at a lunch counter in Denmark, S.C. In the process he chronicles the birth and demise of the group S.N.C.C., or Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a Civil Rights group not satisfied with the N.A.C.C. P.'s willingness to accept the status quo and try to bring equality about slowly and gradually. As Sellers says, during his first sit-in, he thought it was "about the hamburger," that the goal was to get served in a non-segregated way. The book shows how his understanding of the issues grows past the idea that the goal was to eat a hamburger in the "White" section to bringing about fundamental, profound changes in American society that would bring African-Americans true equality.
Sellers demonstrates that many people in the Black community of Denmark were uncomfortable with his growing activism. His mother received critical remarks about him; the President of black, local, Vorhees College was fired when the students became too active for the taste of...
He notes that young Black college students across the South had similar confrontations with their parents as the sit-in movement grew.
The students who began the sit-in movement joined S.N.C.C. just as it was forming, putting Sellers virtually at the beginning of this organization. As a teenager he faced difficult times as the next few years unfolded, including the murder of Civil Rights workers in Meridian, MS in 1963, and the shift of emphasis within the S.N.C.C. On politics rather than integration and voter registration. He also saw the S.N.C.C. gradually distance itself from the White activists who had been welcomed as people ready to work with them for a common cause at the beginning. In the process, he watched as White critics attempted to pretend that it was "about the hamburger," and that they might accept certain adjustments in the Jim Crow rules if the balance of power did not shift, and claims in newspapers that Civil Rights workers who had disappeared were in hiding, either to make it look like foul play when it wasn't, or simply because they were cowards who couldn't face the consequences of their actions.
As a rift developed within the leadership of the S.N.C.C., those opposed to their goals took advantage of it to undermine their…
