BY HANK REICHMAN

Charles G. Sellers

Charles G. Sellers, an historian of the early 19th-century U.S. and longtime member of the University of California at Berkeley Department of History died last week at the age of 98.  As a scholar Sellers was best known for his book, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846, published in 1991, which, according to his obituary in The New York Times, had a “profound” impact, with a “thesis that launched a thousand dissertations.”  In addition to his scholarship, Sellers was an activist and faculty leader and a powerful fighter for racial equality, civil rights, and free speech.  It is that aspect of his life that I wish to celebrate here.

Born in Charlotte, North Carolina, Sellers graduated from Harvard in 1947 and earned the PhD in 1950 at the University of North Carolina.  After stints at the University of Maryland and Princeton he joined the faculty at Berkeley in 1958 as a tenured professor and remained until his retirement in 1990.

Sellers quickly became an active member of the local chapter of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, which was protesting discrimination in jobs and housing in Berkeley and San Francisco.  In 1961, he traveled to Mississippi as a Freedom Rider, where he was arrested.  Eric Etheridge interviewed Sellers for his book, Breach of Peace: Portraits of the 1961 Mississippi Freedom Riders:

After I got to Berkeley in 1958 I was very active in the chapter of CORE here.  It was a very small but devoted band and we raised a lot of hell.  We forced all the downtown businesses to hire blacks and sued landlords and [laughs] marched and demonstrated.

There were a few graduate students from the university involved.  No faculty that I can recall.  Much later, when the demonstrations got to be really big, some faculty came out.  The CORE people were just ordinary people from undistinguished backgrounds, in secular terms.  But they were just really good people who somehow felt it in their hearts that this was the right thing.  We were a devoted little band of brothers and sisters out there for a while, changing the world.

At the time Berkeley, as compared to Chapel Hill, had much the same discrimination in housing and in hiring. But the etiquette of racist supremacy wasn’t enforced so overtly as in the South.  There was a black attorney on the city council.

The strange thing about Berkeley when I first came here was it was a Republican town politically.  The liberal Democrats were just fighting and getting substantial representation as a minority.  The one black council member was allied with these liberal Democrats and he was not too happy about having the boat rocked too much.  The NAACP was more or less playing that same game.  So we were creating discomfort with the local black middle class as well as the whites.

Berkeley was converted into a solidly, if not radically, Democratic town basically by the coincidence of the Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement.  Robert Scheer, who today writes a syndicated column, performed the most profound political transformation I’ve ever seen by running for Congress in 1966 against our liberal Democratic Congressman, who was voting for all the war appropriation bills.

Though he did not win, just by going out and debating the issues openly and passionately, he absolutely turned this community against the war overnight and paved the way for Ron Dellums’ election to Congress four years later.

Sellers’ mug shots after his 1961 Mississippi arrest

From the start Sellers also emerged as a vocal defender of student and faculty speech on campus.  According to Reginald Zelnik’s authoritative history of the faculty’s role in the 1964 Free Speech Movement (FSM), in 1960 the Berkeley administration clashed with the student government and campus newspaper over their support for Leo Koch, a University of Illinois biology professor fired for his public statements about premarital sex — a case that was a landmark for the AAUP and is recounted in delicious detail in the forthcoming book, Dangerous Ideas on Campus: Sex, Conspiracy, and Academic Freedom in the Age of JFK.  The administration of President Clark Kerr demanded that the students renounce their support for Koch on the grounds that university policy enjoined student groups from taking positions on “off-campus” issues.  In response, Sellers and several other faculty members published a statement criticizing the administration and congratulating the students for their courage.  Decrying the Kerr administration’s “moral obtuseness,” the statement declared that “a great university manifests its true character most clearly by its willingness to risk such embarrassment and to defend those who cause it against both public and internal censure.”

The following year another faculty group, including Sellers, sought to reverse the administration’s suspension of a student group that had refused an order to stop calling itself a “campus political party.”  This came after members of the group had participated, with several arrested, in demonstrations against the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in San Francisco.

These were mere skirmishes, however, that led up to the main event: the FSM.  Sellers continues the story:

the Free Speech Movement grew out of the Civil Rights movement.  A member of Berkeley CORE – our little band of 20 or so – was Jack Weinberg, who put up a table on the sidewalk to solicit support for CORE and was hauled off by the Berkeley police or the campus police, actually.

The next day, Jack was back with his table right in the middle of Sproul Plaza, a police car rolled up and they grabbed him and put him in the police car.  Immediately people started sitting down around the police car and getting up on top of it, and that’s how the Free Speech Movement started.

My involvement was immediate.  I can’t remember the exact order of events, but very early there was just a little group of 15 people picketing in circles on the Sproul Hall steps.  When I saw this on my way to lunch, I decided to take a few turns in the picket line.  “What are you doing up there, Charlie?” a passing colleague called out. “What are you doing down there, Waldo?” I replied too cleverly by half. [Henry David Thoreau, who had been imprisoned for not paying taxes as a protest against slavery and the war against Mexico, had addressed a similar riposte to his good friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Historian humor–HR.]

Then at another point – this captured-police-car incident went on for several days and nights – I got up on the car and said something, as had a lot of other people.  So I was right into it from the get-go.

There was a lot of faculty politics in all of this and there was a big left/right split in the faculty.  I helped organize the left caucus – it was even called the Sellers Group for a time.  The one thing I learned in all this is that you can’t get anything by being reasonable, they’ll end up screwing you every time.  You have to be totally unreasonable.

We were trying to organize support for the free-speech causes from nervous faculty liberals, who kept telling student activists to be nice and accept the latest nice offer from the administration.  Again and again, the students proved their faculty sympathizers to be naïve wimps.  Because every time the students were “nice” and “reasonable” they were betrayed, co-opted, disempowered and so forth.

The students had to bring the institution to a standstill before that changed.  The only successful strategy was to be uncompromising in what you were expecting and demanding.

Of his scholarship, Sellers told a 1994 conference: “I took alarm when historians armed the United States for Cold War by purging class from consciousness.  Muffling exploitative capital in appealing democratic garb, their mythology of consensual democratic capitalism purged egalitarian meaning from democracy.”

Well into his retirement Sellers would continue to be a voice speaking out for social justice and against neoliberal university administrators.

He will be missed.