Bakari Sellers made history in 2006, when at the age of 22, he was elected to the South Carolina legislature, becoming the youngest elected African American official in the country. Growing up in the rural south, Sellers father, Cleveland Sellers, was a civil rights activist who worked with Martin Luther King and other civil rights icons. In his new memoir, My Vanishing Country, Bakari Sellers writes that he sees his life as an extension of his father’s journey, writing compellingly about the particular challenges of small town Black communities that are far from the glare of urban centers.