C. T. Vivian

• Born: July 30, 1924
• Birthplace: Boonville, Missouri
• Died: July 17, 2020
• Place of death: Atlanta, Georgia

Activist and religious leader

An associate of Martin Luther King Jr., Vivian was instrumental in bringing to the civil rights movement the tactic of nonviolent direct action. An ordained minister, Vivian also helped organize Christian church support of the movement’s goals and wrote the first insider’s reflection on the movement’s successes, failures, and future.

Early Life

Cordy Tindell Vivian was born in Howard County, Missouri, the only child of Robert Cordie and Euzetta Tindell Vivian. After setbacks early in the Great Depression, Euzetta and her mother, Annie Woods Tindell, moved to Macomb, Illinois, with Tindell when he was six.

In the community and as a student, Vivian experienced discrimination. African Americans were prohibited from swimming in a local pool and he recalled a schoolmate sending him a card with a racist comment. However, as an adolescent, Vivian became active in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, in which he taught Sunday school and unsuccessfully tried to organize African Americans in local Baptist and Church of God in Christ congregations to worship together.

After graduating from high school, Vivian attended Western Illinois State Teachers College in Macomb. There, he struggled with faculty he considered bigoted and worked for the student newspaper, The Western Courier, where he won an award for sports writing. He dropped out before graduation and moved to nearby Peoria, where he worked as assistant director at a community center and met his future wife, Octavia Geans.

In Peoria in the late 1940s, Vivian participated in his first protests, attempting to integrate a restaurant and the city’s major employer, Caterpillar Tractor Co. After working at the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) in Chicago, Vivian returned to Peoria to work at the Foster and Gallagher mail-order company. There, he felt a calling to the ministry, and company owner Helen Gallagher helped him enroll in a seminary.

Life’s Work

At the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1955, Vivian served as pastor at churches in Nashville and Chattanooga. While studying in Nashville, he met James Lawson, a minister and acolyte of Mahatma Gandhi who was teaching nonviolent direct action strategies to a local student group. Among Vivian’s fellow students were young people from Fisk and Tennessee State universities, and his classmates included James Bevel, Bernard LaFayette, Diane Nash, and John Robert Lewis. Lewis became a Georgia congressman; Nash helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); LaFayette was active with the Quakers’ American Friends Service Committee; and Bevel was involved with civil rights for decades, including helping to organize 1995’s Million Man March.

Vivian helped organize the first sit-ins for social justice in Nashville in 1960. On April 19 of that year, 4,000 demonstrators marched on Nashville’s City Hall, where Vivian and Nash challenged Nashville mayor Ben West to agree that racial discrimination was morally wrong. He did so, publicly. Many of the students involved in that demonstration became involved with SNCC.

A year later, Vivian was one of the few members of the clergy who joined the bus integration Freedom Rides through the segregated South, replacing injured members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) after mobs had assaulted participants. He rode on the first Freedom Bus to enter Jackson, Mississippi.

In 1963, Vivian was appointed to the executive staff of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), where Martin Luther King Jr. named him national director of affiliates. In that capacity through 1966, Vivian was one of that select group known as King’s lieutenants. He was the liaison between headquarters and SCLC chapters throughout the South, along with a few in the North. He also worked as a sort of front man, going into cities whose residents had asked for King’s and the SCLC’s help, gathering information to take back to headquarters, where King and his staff would analyze the situation and decide how to proceed. Throughout, Vivian helped with grassroots organizing and teaching nonviolent strategies.

During this time, Vivian was beaten, repeatedly jailed, and narrowly escaped being drowned, shot, and blown up. For example, Vivian later wrote, 1963’s Birmingham campaign—which SCLC leaders dubbed “Project C”—was the first widespread use of nonviolent direct action. The city that had closed public parks rather than integrate them and that had seventeen unsolved bombings of African American churches saw multiple mass protests until almost twenty-five hundred demonstrators were in jail at one time.

“There were the joys of those who had never before stood up and defied the ancient cruelties,” Vivian said in his book Black Power and the American Myth (1970). “But there were terrors, too. Two blocks away [from their church headquarters] at the edge of the ghetto were the barricades where we were attacked by Bull Connor’s police and firemen with dogs, clubs and high-pressure hoses.”

In 1965, Vivian confronted Sheriff Jim Clark on the steps of the Selma, Alabama, courthouse during a voter registration drive. After an impassioned speech by Vivian, Clark—one of the local officials responsible for the arrests of civil rights protestors during the three important Selma-to-Montgomery marches—struck Vivian on the mouth, an incident that made national news. The following summer, Vivian conceived of and directed an educational program, Vision, and sent more than seven hundred Alabama students to college with scholarships. The program later became Upward Bound.

Vivian in 1969 wrote Black Power and the American Myth, an insider’s analysis of the civil rights movement. Published by Fortress Press in 1970, the paperback explains five goals the movement had in the 1950s and 1960s: creating a new condition, bringing the black middle class into the struggle, changing the values of the whole United States, considering new methods of social action to cement citizen involvement and to create a more effective force, and using nonviolence. The book also seemed to predict, if not advocate, an armed insurrection should nonviolence continue to fall short of its goals.

In his later years, Vivian led the Black Strategy Center think tank and organized and chaired the National Anti-Klan Network. Later renamed the Center for Democratic Renewal and affiliated with Political Research Associates and the Policy Action Network, it was a multiracial group that promoted the vision of a democratic, just society free of racism and bigotry.

Vivian also established the Atlanta-based Black Action Strategies and Information Center (BASIC), which consults employers on race relations and multicultural training. In 2008, he helped found the C. T. Vivian Leadership Institute, also based in Atlanta, to develop and foster sustainability in communities.

Vivian died at his home in Atlanta on July 17, 2020, at the age of ninety-five.

Significance

Whether working for civil rights in the 1960s, speaking about racism, nonviolence, and King, or appearing on television programs and documentaries, Vivian dedicated several decades to the fight for social justice. Throughout, he embraced and promoted the ethics and effectiveness of nonviolence. In 2013, his work was further recognized when he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Barack Obama.

Bibliography

Adams, Pam. “Changing the Nation.” Peoria Journal Star, October 24, 1999. An exhaustive profile of Vivian accompanied by a time line and an interview.

Fitzgerald, David. “C. T. Vivian Earns His Way.” The Western Courier, September 29, 2003. A news story on Vivian’s visit to his hometown and first college on the occasion of the community celebrating C. T. Vivian Day and naming a street in his honor.

McFadden, Robert D. "C. T. Vivian, Martin Luther King's Field General, Dies at 95." The New York Times, 19 July 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/us/ct-vivian-dead.html. Accessed 29 Oct. 2020.

Vivian, C. T. Black Power and the American Myth. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970. The first look at the U.S. Civil Rights movement from an insider’s perspective, this book outlines its methods and warns of dire consequences should reform not take place.

Walker, Lydia. Challenge and Change: The Story of Civil Rights Activist C. T. Vivian. Alpharetta, Ga.: Dreamkeeper Press, 1993. A biography of Vivian aimed at young readers.

Williams, Juan. Eyes on the Prize. New York: Penguin, 1988. Written as a companion to the PBS television series of the same name, this book benefits from the author’s insights into the Civil Rights movement and period photos that together effectively summarize the time.