Hines, Heatley honored for contributions to community

Former Hartsville City Councilman and business and civic leader Franklin Hines received dual honors Sunday when he was named Citizen of the Year and Omega Man of the Year by the brothers of the Alpha Beta Beta Chapter of the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity.

Dr. Alvin Heatley received the organization’s Service Award during the group’s annual Achievement Week Program at Kay Branch Missionary Baptist Church.

The theme for this year’s program was “Unity Through Friendship, Brotherhood and Fraternity.”

Dr. Cleveland Sellers Jr., president of Voorhees College in Denmark, S.C., delivered the keynote address for the event.

“Education must become the new civil rights frontier,” Sellers said.

Sellers spoke about the importance of education, faith and service in the life of a community.

“These are values we have to find a way to pass along to our young people,” Sellers said.

But those values, he said, appear to be eroding. Drug abuse, crime, unemployment and poor health are leading to a lack of faith in community, and he called for a recommitment to those core values.

He said it is up to adults to raise the level of expectations for today’s generation of young people. To aim low, Sellers said, is a sin.

“Too many of our young people have low expectations because our schools have low expectations,” he said.

“We have to go back in and look at our community and our institutions and get our institutions back on track,” he said. “We have to build community. We have to reform these institutions and move forward.”

He said that while African Americans endured and persevered through the hardships of slavery and the struggles of the Civil Rights movement, new challenges will lie ahead in the 21st century.

Sellers said significant opposition remains to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation decision.

“There are still people working to make the public education system fail,” he said.

He said that despite the election of Barack Obama as the nation’s first African American president, blacks cannot afford to become complacent.

“All of it is not in his control,” he said. “He cannot do it all. We have to act. This will require a new commitment by all of us who are adults.”

Sellers was one of 27 people wounded in the Orangeburg Massacre on the campus of South Carolina State University on Feb. 8, 1968, when local police fired on a group of students who had built a bonfire to protest the racial segregation of a local bowling alley. Three students died in the shooting.

Nine law enforcement officers were tried in federal court on charges of using excessive force at a campus protest and were acquitted.

Sellers was the only person involved in the incident to serve any time in prison. He was convicted of inciting a riot. He served seven months in prison. Twenty-five years after serving his sentence, Sellers was pardoned.

Before becoming president of Voorhees, Sellers served as director of the African American Studies program at the University of South Carolina. He has been a speaker, presenter and panelist at numerous conferences across the U.S. and is the author of six publications.