React JS onClick event handler

Why not:

onItemClick: function (event) {

    event.currentTarget.style.backgroundColor="#ccc";

},

render: function() {
    return (
        <div>
            <ul>
                <li onClick={this.onItemClick}>Component 1</li>
            </ul>
        </div>
    );
}

And if you want to be more React-ive about it, you might want to set the selected item as state of its containing React component, then reference that state to determine the item’s color within render:

onItemClick: function (event) {

    this.setState({ selectedItem: event.currentTarget.dataset.id });
    //where 'id' =  whatever suffix you give the data-* li attribute
},

render: function() {
    return (
        <div>
            <ul>
                <li onClick={this.onItemClick} data-id="1" className={this.state.selectedItem == 1 ? "on" : "off"}>Component 1</li>
                <li onClick={this.onItemClick} data-id="2" className={this.state.selectedItem == 2 ? "on" : "off"}>Component 2</li>
                <li onClick={this.onItemClick} data-id="3" className={this.state.selectedItem == 3 ? "on" : "off"}>Component 3</li>
            </ul>
        </div>
    );
},

You’d want to put those <li>s into a loop, and you need to make the li.on and li.off styles set your background-color.