San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
SANDI DOLBEE:
NEW MEMOIR SHOWS THE RELIGIOUS RIGHTEOUSNESS THAT DROVE A ‘NONVIOLENT WARRIOR’
It was raining on that February day in 1965, when the Rev. C.T. Vivian led a group of Black residents to the courthouse in Selma, Ala., to register to vote. Waiting for them was a “virulent, racist sheriff ” named Jim Clark, along with his deputies and television cameras.
Despite Vivian’s passionate pleas — “you know in your heart what is right” — Clark refused to let them enter the courthouse. He then turned away, gripping his all-too-familiar club. “You can turn your back on me, but you cannot turn you back on the idea of justice,” Vivian told the sheriff. “You can turn your back now and you can keep the club in your hand, but you cannot beat down justice.”
The sheriff listened for bit longer and then slugged Vivian in the face with such force that it sent the Baptist minister tumbling down the steps. Vivian quickly picked himself up. “You can arrest us, Sheriff Clark,” he called out. “You don’t have to beat us.”
Clark arrested him and put him in jail, where Vivian was beaten again.
But that sheriff ’s vicious punch was seen around the world, thanks to those TV cameras. And it would become a pivotal moment in helping to persuade President Lyndon Johnson to sign the Voting Rights Act, prohibiting racial discrimination in voting.
It also is one of Steve Fiffer’s favorite parts of “It’s in the Action: Memories of a Nonviolent Warrior,” a memoir he co-authored with Vivian, which is scheduled to be released posthumously on March 16. Vivian, one of the giants of the civil rights movement and a field general for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., died last year at age 95.
During a media briefing about the book on Zoom, Fiffer read from Vivian’s explanation of why he got back up that day and faced his attacker.
“It becomes very clear that we can never allow evil to destroy the forces of righteousness, even when beaten down,” Vivian explains. “I had to get back up because otherwise people would have been defeated by violence. We can never allow violence to defeat nonviolence.”
The sin of racism
Vivian began fighting the good fight of nonviolent protests in the 1940s. Over two decades, he was undaunted in his crusade to integrate lunch counters, restaurants, hotels, beaches, buses, voting booths and all kinds of everyday places that denied equal access to Blacks, particularly in the South.
As it was for so many other civil rights activists, this movement was a religious one, waged against the sins of racism and bigotry.
“Our theology taught us that those resources that God gave you could not be used to perpetuate an evil,” he wrote of his protests against segregated businesses. “So putting those resources in the hands of merchants who were perpetuating the evil of racism was against God.”
He endured repeated beatings, some so bad he had to be hospitalized, a near-drowning and a seemingly endless parade of jail cells. “But you see, here’s where nonviolence saves us again,” he tells us. “Because no matter what they said, the oppressed were moving against the oppression with nothing in their hands with which to destroy, but something in their heart.”
Vivian became King’s national director of the affiliate chapters of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and part of a storied cast of civil rights icons — John Lewis, James Lawson, Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young and Diane Nash, among others.
When King was assassinated in Memphis in 1968, Vivian immediately flew there. He and King’s other close friends went to the mortuary to pick out a casket. It was, he remembers, one of the worst days of his life.
Vivian would go on to start programs to help young African Americans excel in high school and go to college. One of these programs later became Upward Bound, whose alumni include Oprah Winfrey, actresses Angela Bassett and Viola Davis, and basketball great Patrick Ewing.
He also founded a consulting firm for companies with multiethnic workforces. His son, Al Vivian, now runs it.
In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “At 89 years old, Rev. Vivian is still out there, still in the action, pushing us closer to our founding ideals,” Obama said at the ceremony.
Co-author takes over
Vivian died on July 17, 2020, at his home in Atlanta. It was the same day that we lost another hero of the movement, and Vivian’s longtime friend, Congressman John Lewis.
Here is where the story about the making of Vivian’s memoir takes a rather interesting turn.
“It’s in the Action” was not finished. He and Fiffer had been working on it for some 18 months and had gotten up to about 1970. It already was a challenging project for Fiffer, because Vivian’s memory was fading. Remember, he was in his 90s when they started.
Fiffer, a seasoned author whose past collaborations include former Secretary of State James Baker and Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center, already had been doing a lot of research to fill in the gaps and help prompt Vivian during their interviews.
But now, Vivian was gone — and Fiffer would be on his own to finish telling about this man’s remarkable life.
The tributes that poured in after Vivian’s death — from thenpresidential candidate Joe Biden to Winfrey and baseball legend Hank Aaron — “energized the Vivian family and me to finish the memoir as soon as possible,” Fiffer told me a couple of weeks after that original media briefing. They teamed up with Newsouth Books, a publishing house in Alabama that specializes in books about the South and civil rights. Newsouth was eager to expedite publication.
Fiffer drew upon conversations with family members, interviews with Vivian that had been filmed for documentaries and historical records, along with old sermons, news clips and other materials to help complete the book.
“It was a challenge, but it just seemed to be a worthy challenge,” Fiffer says. “This may sound kind of silly, but if you can get threequarters of the way up Mount Everest, that’s better than not going up at all.”
First and only memoir
Finishing the book was important for yet another reason: It’s the only one that chronicles Vivian’s life.
“I was just shocked that he had never written a memoir or an autobiography and no one had written a biography of him,” Fiffer admits.
It’s a fact made even more puzzling because Vivian was a voracious lover of books. His massive personal collection, which is being donated to Atlanta for a special library, includes some 6,000 volumes of African American literature.
Vivian’s son suggests his father was simply too busy doing the present-day work to write about the past. “I think the other thing was Dad always tried to stay in the background,” Al Vivian says. “For him, it was never about him. I would just guess that that would have a lot to do with it. He wasn’t trying to take the limelight.”
Some might call the book, which is filled with what Vivian did and why he did it, a guide for
“It’s in the Action” by C.T. Vivian with Steve Fiffer (Newsouth Books, 2021; 208 pages)
C.T. Vivian
effective protesting even in this 21st century. Its final pages include an epilogue with these words from Obama: “I’m only here because of C.T. Vivian and all the heroes of the Civil Rights Generation. Because of them, the idea of a just, fair, inclusive, and generous America came closer into focus. The trail they blazed gave today’s generation of activists and marchers a roadmap to tap into and finish the journey.”
Vivian, like so many others in the civil rights generation, is gone — and the struggle against the sin of racism continues. But the story of this great-great-grandson of a slave, who got knocked down and got back up again and again and again, has finally been told.
Dolbee is the former religion and ethics editor of The San Diego Union-tribune and a former president of the Religion News Association. sandidolbeecolumns@gmail.com