Two hundred veterans of the civil rights movement, including USC professor Cleveland Sellers, joined together Wednesday to support affirmative action, declaring in a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court that the policy is essential to achieving racial equality.

The brief was filed in support of a University of Michigan admissions policy that makes race a factor in acceptance of prospective students.

"We have joined here to try to make our voices heard, so we need never again witness the lives of gifted children and young adults of color blighted by the denial of opportunity," the activists wrote.

Sellers, a native of Denmark, S.C., led protests in South Carolina and elsewhere during the 1960s as a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He was shot in 1968 by a patrolman during what's become known as the Orangeburg Massacre. He spent seven months in jail after being charged with inciting a riot in connection with that incident but was later pardoned.

Sellers said affirmative action continues the struggle for civil rights. Despite the elimination of many segregated facilities through protest during the '60s, he said, "de facto segregation and discrimination were still with us."

"There was still the attitude that blacks should be the last hired and the first fired," he said.

The brief was one of many filed in support of the university's policy before the midnight Wednesday deadline.

Others weighing in on the biggest affirmative action case the court will decide in decades included: a group of U.S. senators, among them Democratic presidential candidates John Edwards of North Carolina and John Kerry of Massachusetts; a group of 65 companies, including Nike, Reebok, Pepsi, Coca-Cola and ChevronTexaco; and several former military leaders, including retired Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf.

Briefs supporting affirmative action outweighed those opposing it by a ratio of more than 3-to-1. The white applicants seeking to overturn the university's policy were backed by the Bush administration, the state of Florida, and the Cato Institute, a conservative think tank.

The list of civil rights veterans reads like a who's who from the movement. Along with Sellers, it includes U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga.; national NAACP chairman Julian Bond; and the families of Herbert Lee, Vernon Dahmer, Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman and James Chaney. Those five were murdered while working for voting rights in Mississippi during the 1960s.

Also included were Diane Nash, a leader along with Lewis of the lunch-counter sit-ins in Nashville; and Bob Moses, the driving force behind "Freedom Summer," the renowned Mississippi voter education project in which Goodman, Chaney and Schwerner were involved when they were killed in Philadelphia, Miss., in 1964.

The activists, scattered across the country, were contacted by attorney Mitchell Zimmerman, who drafted the brief.

Zimmerman began with an Internet mailing list of members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which brought maybe a dozen signers, he said. Through word of mouth and repeated urging, he said, more signers were contacted.

The brief noted that the Supreme Court recently benefited from diversity during a hearing on a cross-burning case. Justice Clarence Thomas, the court's only black, said a burning cross was "intended to cause fear and to terrorize a population."

The activists wrote: "It is no coincidence that so intense an understanding of the significance of 100 years of lynchings and domestic racial terrorism came most forcefully (and perhaps exclusively) from the consciousness of the one African American member of the Court."

Sellers, who now teachers African-American history at USC, disputed President Bush's recent statement that the University of Michigan's admission policy involved racial quotas.

"It's a weighting system; it's not a quota system," he said. "So I think it's just unfortunate that the president would make it that kind of issue."