Bakari Sellers is an activist, politician, lawyer, TV commentator, and proud son of South Carolina. His personal history, recounted in My Vanishing Country (Amistad/HarperCollins, May 19), is both impressive and fascinating. As the son of civil rights leader Cleveland Sellers, who was injured during the Orangeburg Massacre of 1968, the author was imbued with an activist spirit early on. After achievement at Morehouse College and the USC School of Law, he won a seat in the South Carolina House of Representatives at age 22, becoming the youngest black elected official in the country. When he lost the 2014 race for lieutenant governor, Sellers continued his crusading legal work and became a political analyst for CNN, where he garnered praise for his coverage of, among many other events, the 2015 Mother Emanuel shooting in Charleston. He recently spoke with Kirkus about the book.

How was the writing experience?

Difficult—I can’t lie. I wanted to write a political book during the age of Trump from the perspective of a young black Democrat in the South. But no one wanted to buy that book.

I find that surprising.

I got turned down probably 20 times. But I have that strong South Carolina spirit, so finally I just called up Tracy Sherrod, the editorial director at Amistad. She called me in to meet with Patrik Bass [senior editor at HarperCollins] and Judith Carr [president and publisher of Amistad]. When you’re 33, writing a memoir is a bit daunting. But I also realized that my life has been bookended by tragedy from Orangeburg to Charleston, and I had a story to tell from the perspective of being a child of the civil rights movement. My father wrote The River of No Return (1973), and I look at [my book] as being not the completion of that, but a continuation, the next chapters in that story.

I was particularly moved by the section on the Mother Emanuel tragedy. Can you tell me more about that time?

For me, it was pain that I had never truly felt before—probably because I had a friendship with Clem [Clementa Pinckney, the state senator and pastor at Emanuel who was killed in the shooting]. I also know the value of the black church in our communities, and I can imagine [Clem’s] welcoming spirit when he let Dylann Roof into the church to pray with them.

Everyone was trying to figure out whether or not to go to church that Sunday. A member asked me if I wanted to come into church. I declined because I wanted to make sure the members had enough space, so we sat outside and listened to the sermon and the music. The recovery was a testament to the beauty of our state, and politically speaking, you don’t get any better leadership than Gregg Mullins [chief of police at the time] and Mayor Joe Riley.

Tell me about your hometown of Denmark, then and now.

Denmark is a town marked by so much love and family. Everybody’s a cousin, everybody’s a brother or a sister. It’s a place where you can still leave your keys in your car when you go into the grocery store. But it also faces a lot of the issues that overlay most of rural America, especially throughout the South, where socio-economic divides have gotten larger and access to health care has disappeared. It’s kind of ironic that the book comes out now, when the pandemic is showing our true colors. We are able to see a lot of these disparities where people in rural communities and poor folks and black and brown folks are dying at very high rates.

Tell me about your work at the law firm.

Not only do we represent the citizens of Denmark in the water lawsuit, but we were lead counsel in a National Black Farmers Association lawsuit, representing black farmers against the USDA. I also argued in front of the South Carolina Supreme Court to find our domestic violence laws unconstitutional because they didn’t cover same-sex couples, and we won that argument.

What about your political career?

My political career’s not over. I will always do my best to represent Denmark in whatever way I can. We’re eyeing the 6th Congressional District, whenever that time comes. I was fortunate enough to find a home at CNN.

What’s it like at CNN?

Right now, we’re not talking politics as much as public health. It’s not as busy, but that will change. I go from being on 15 to 20 times a week to slow moments like this. But you have to remember, I’m a kid from Denmark, 3,300 people; to be able to go on [TV] and talk to 1 million people, that’s pretty damn cool.

I often feel helpless and hopeless about the state of our country. You live these issues every day. Give me some words of encouragement.

First, I tell people to make sure you are trying to come out of this physically, emotionally, and spiritually stronger. Second, I remind people that you can’t eat a whole apple without taking the first bite. You can’t complete a whole journey without the first step. And you have to find something in your heart that gives you a burning desire to go forward. For me, those are my kids, thinking about creating an America where they can be free. That gives me purpose, as well as not letting my father and my mother down for all the sacrifices they’ve made in the past.

Eric Liebetrau is the managing editor and nonfiction editor.