The River of No Return

In 1962, at the age of seventeen, Cleveland Sellers joined the Nonviolent Action Group, an affiliate of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Sellers had grown up in Denmark, South Carolina, in a comfortable, middle-class home; now, working with SNCC, his eyes were opened to the full depth of the struggle against white oppression. Soon Sellers, along with Stokely Carmichael, had become a top official in the organization, and played a key role in SNCC’s Freedom Summer in 1964.

The River of No Return is both the story of one young man’s journey, and an insider’s account of the civil rights movement. Sellers writes of the early sit-ins coordinated by SNCC; of the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner by the Ku Klux Klan; the Selma Campaign; the Meredith march; and the many other key events of these tumultuous years. Through his eyes we see the birth of Black Power, and then, ultimately, the fragmentation of the movement and the demise of SNCC after the departure of Carmichael. Intertwined with Sellers’s personal story are intimate portraits of the others who helped build the movement, among them Martin Luther King Jr., Julian Bond, Stokely Carmichael, John Lewis, and Bob Moses. 

A classic memoir of civil rights, organizing, and the struggle for black identity, The River of No Return is as timely today as it was when it was first published in 1973.