Early civil rights leader Rev. C.T. Vivian dies at 95

ATLANTA — The Rev. C.T. Vivian, an early and key adviser to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. who organized pivotal civil rights campaigns and spent decades advocating for justice and equality, died Friday at the age of 95.

Vivian began staging sitins against segregation in Peoria, Illinois, in the 1940s — a dozen years before lunch-counter protests by college students made national news. He met King soon after the budding civil rights leader’s leadership of the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, and helped translate ideas into action by organizing the Freedom Rides that forced federal intervention across the South.

Vivian boldly challenged a segregationist sheriff while trying to register Black voters in Selma, Alabama, where hundreds, then thousands, later marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

“You can turn your back now and you can keep your club in your hand, but you cannot beat down justice. And we will register to vote because as citizens of these United States we have the right to do it,” Vivian declared, wagging his index finger at Sheriff Jim Clark as the cameras rolled.

The sheriff then punched him, and news coverage of the assault helped turned a local registration drive into a national phenomenon.

Former diplomat and congressman Andrew Young, another close King confidant, said Vivian was always “one of the people who had the most insight, wisdom, integrity and dedication.”

Barack Obama, who honored Vivian with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013, tweeted Friday that “he was always one of the first in the action — a Freedom Rider, a marcher in Selma, beaten, jailed, almost killed, absorbing blows in hopes that fewer of us would have to.”

“He waged nonviolent campaigns for integration across the south, and campaigns for economic justice throughout the north, knowing that even after the Voting Rights Act and Civil Rights Act that he helped win, our long journey to equality was nowhere near finished,” Obama wrote.

Obama also drew a direct line from “Vivian and all the heroes in that Civil Rights Generation” to today’s generation of activists, saying “I have to imagine that seeing the largest protest movement in history unfold over his final months gave the Reverend a final dose of hope.”

Vivian died at home in Atlanta of natural causes Friday morning, his friend and business partner Don Rivers confirmed to The Associated Press.

LAVONDIA MAJORS/THE TENNESSEAN VIA AP The Rev. C.T. Vivian uses an intercom on a bus in Montgomery, Ala., in 2007 to discuss the experiences he encountered in 1961 as a Freedom Rider. Vivian, a civil rights veteran who worked alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. has died at home in Atlanta. He was 95.