STREAMING PROGRAM INFORMATION
- This program is part of our Smithsonian Associates Streaming series.
- Platform: Zoom
- Online registration is required.
- For multiple registrations, you will be asked to supply individual names and email addresses.
Bakari Sellers, a CNN analyst and one of the youngest state representatives in South Carolina history, examines the plight of the South's dwindling rural population of black working-class men and women, many of whom can trace their ancestry back for seven generations.
Drawing on his new book My Vanishing Country, the native of Denmark, South Carolina, addresses the crises affecting his family members, neighbors, and friends—issues that are mostly overlooked by the media. He surveys the struggles that shape their lives: to gain access to healthcare as rural hospitals disappear; to make ends meet as the factories they have relied on shut down and move overseas; to hold on to precious traditions as their towns erode; and to forge a path forward without succumbing to despair.
In conversation with WAMU’s Sasha-Ann Simons, Sellers discusses his journey through the South’s past, present, and future. Sellers also traces the influence his father, Cleveland—a friend of Stokely Carmichael and Martin Luther King, a civil rights hero, and member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee—had on his life and career.
Copies of My Vanishing Country (HarperCollins) are available for sale.
Book Sale Information
Patron Information
- Once registered, patrons should receive an automatic email confirmation from CustomerService@SmithsonianAssociates.org.
- Separate Zoom link information will be emailed closer to the date of the program. If you do not receive your Zoom link information 24 hours prior to the start of the program, please email Customer Service for assistance.
- View Common FAQs about our Streaming Programs on Zoom.
