C.T. Vivian, King aide bloodied on the front lines of civil rights protest, dies at 95

C.T. Vivian, a Baptist minister and aide to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. who was bloodied on the front lines of the civil rights movement and helped shape the protests that were a turning point in the battle against racial injustice in the Jim Crow South, died July 17 at his home in Atlanta. He was 95.

His daughter Jo Anna Walker confirmed the death, saying he that had a mild stroke last year but that she did not know the immediate cause.

Vivian participated in a 1947 lunch-counter sit-in protest in Peoria, Ill., more than a dozen years before such confrontations at segregated cafeterias became a mainstream tactic of the civil rights struggle. He was also among the Freedom Rider activists in 1961 who traveled by bus into the Deep South to test enforcement of a U.S. Supreme Court case that had outlawed discrimination in interstate transportation facilities.

Vivian was in Selma to register African Americans to vote while the county board of registrars threw up resistance, at first declining to accept applications and then insisting on literacy tests and other hurdles to slow down the process. A federal district judge demanded an end to such roadblocks.

Amid a light rain, Vivian corralled about 100 followers — in a line that snaked around the county courthouse —to take shelter on the building steps. Clark and his club-wielding deputies ordered Vivian to leave and began to shove everyone off the steps.

The minister held his ground and called the sheriff a “brute” and “Hitler,” according to press accounts. Clark - a stocky 220 pounds - aimed a fist at Vivian’s mouth, sending him reeling down the stairs before he was taken to jail on a charge of criminal provocation.

Clark later said he did not recall injuring Vivian until an X-ray exam showed the sheriff had a linear fracture in a finger on his left hand. “Every time it appears the movement is dying out, Sheriff Clark comes to our rescue,” an SCLC staffer told the New York Times, noting a continuing series of barbaric attacks on protesters in the days that followed.

The skirmishes in Selma culminated in the March 1965 “Bloody Sunday” clash at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Captured on national television, the incident galvanized congressional support for the Voting Rights Act to prohibit racial discrimination in balloting.

Over the years, he became a keeper of the flame of the civil rights protest era. In 2013, President Barack Obama bestowed on Vivian the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor.

In a statement Friday, the former president wrote that Vivian “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.”