num_pages: 227
description: Part memoir part historical and cultural analysis My Vanishing Country is an eye-opening journey through the South's past present and future.Anchored in in Bakari Sellers' hometown of Denmark South Carolina Country illuminates the pride and pain that continues to fertilize the soil of one of the poorest states in the nation. He traces his fathers rise to become a friend of Stokely Carmichael and Martin Luther King a civil rights hero and a member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to explore the plight of the South's dwindling rural black working classmany of whom can trace their ancestry back for seven generations.In his poetic personal history we are awakened to the crisis affecting the other Forgotten Men &amp; Women who the media seldom acknowledges. For Sellers these are his family members neighbors and friends. He humanizes 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; to forge a path forward without succumbing to despair.My Vanishing Country is also a love letter to fatherhoodto Sellers' father his lodestar whose life lessons have shaped him and to his newborn twins who he hopes will embrace the Sellers family name and honor its legacy.
language: English
title: My Vanishing Country
publisher: Amistad