Rev. C.T. Vivian — civil rights pioneer helped organize MLK’s rallies, boycotts

The Rev. C.T. Vivian, a pioneering civil rights organizer and field general for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the historic struggle for racial justice a halfcentury ago, died Friday at his home in Atlanta. He was 95.

Two of his daughters, Kira Vivian and Denise Morse, confirmed the death. Morse said Vivian had been in hospice care.

In a nation trying to come to grips with racial inequality in the 1960s, Vivian was a paladin of nonviolence on the front lines of bloody confrontations. He led passive protesters through shrieking white mobs and, with discipline and endurance, absorbed the blows of segregationists and complicit law enforcement officials across the South.

Vivian was a Baptist minister and a member of King’s inner circle of advisers, alongside Fred L. Shuttlesworth, Wyatt Tee Walker, Ralph Abernathy and other civil rights luminaries. He was the national director of 85 local affiliate chapters of the SCLC from 1963 to 1966, directing protest activities and training in nonviolence, as well as coordinating voter registration and community development projects. In Selma and Birmingham, Ala.; St. Augustine, Fla.; Jackson, Miss.; and other segregated cities, Vivian led sitins at lunch counters, boycotts of businesses and marches that continued for weeks or months, raising tensions that often led to mass arrests and harsh repression.

Televised scenes of marchers attacked by police officers and firefighters with cattle prods, snarling dogs, fire hoses and nightsticks shocked the national conscience, legitimized the civil rights movement and led to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

“Nonviolence is the only honorable way of dealing with social change, because if we are wrong, nobody gets hurt but us,” Vivian said in an address to civil rights workers, as recounted in “At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 196568,” (2006) by Taylor Branch.

Like his followers, Vivian was arrested often, jailed and beaten.

After leaving King’s staff, Vivian founded educational and civil rights organizations, lectured widely, promoted jobs for Black Chicagoans and wrote “Black Power and the American Myth” (1970), an early assessment of the civil rights movement.

Cordy Tindell Vivian was born in Boonville, Mo., on July 30, 1924, the only child of Robert and Euzetta Tindell Vivian. His family moved to Macomb, Ill., when he was 6 and he graduated from Macomb High School in 1942.

In 1945, Vivian married Jane Teague, who worked at a hardware store, and they had one daughter, Jo Anna Walker. They separated amicably in the late 1940s and divorced later so Vivian could marry Octavia Geans in 1952. She was the author of “Coretta” (1970), the first biography of King’s wife, Coretta Scott King. She died in 2011.

Vivian’s civil rights work continued for a half century. He became director of the Urban Training Center for Christian Mission in Chicago in 1966, and dean of the Shaw University Divinity School in Raleigh, N.C., in 1972.

He later founded the Black Action Strategies and Information Center in Atlanta and was a founder of the National AntiKlan Network.

He was deputy director for clergy in the 1984 presidential campaign of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, appeared on “Eyes on the Prize” (1987), a 14part PBS documentary on the civil rights era, and was later the focus of a PBS special, “The Healing Ministry of Dr. C.T. Vivian.”

He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, from President Barack Obama in 2013.