Rev. C.T. Vivian, key civil rights leader, 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 sit-ins against segregation in Peoria, Illinois, in the 1940s. 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 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.”
Speaking with students in Tennessee 50 years after the Voting Rights Act was signed into law, Vivian urged them to act strategically. The civil rights movement was effective not only because of its nonviolence, but because activists made sure their messages were amplified, he said.
“This is what made the movement: Our voice was really heard. But it didn’t happen by accident; we made certain it was heard,” Vivian said.
Cordy Tindell Vivian was born July 28, 1924, in Howard County, Missouri, but moved to Macomb, Illinois, with his mother as a young boy. He studied theology alongside future civil rights leader and U.S. Congressman John Lewis at the American Baptist College in Nashville, Tennessee, where they trained waves of activists in nonviolent protest.
King made Vivian his national director of affiliates at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and sent him around the South to register voters, an effort that brought Vivian to Selma in 1965. Standing on the Dallas County courthouse steps as a line of Black people stretched down the block behind him, he argued for their voting rights until Clark’s punch knocked him flat.
Vivian stood back up and kept talking before he was stitched up and jailed, and his mistreatment helped draw thousands of protesters, whose determination to march from Selma to Montgomery pressured Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act later that year.
Vivian continued to serve in the SCLC after King’s assassination in 1968, and became its interim president in 2012.