Civil Rights Activist Rev. C.T. Vivian's memorial set to livestream Thursday morning
Rev. C.T. Vivian was often in the middle of heated campaigns and police standoffs in the bloodiest chapter of the Civil Rights battles of the 1960’s.
And on July 17, the 95-year-old veteran of so many battles to integrate the South died on the same day and in the same city, Atlanta, that Rep. John Lewis, 80, died after his battle with pancreatic cancer.
“C.T. Vivian was humble and loved the Lord,” said Rev. Gerald Durley, Pastor Emeritus of the Providence Missionary Baptist Church in Atlanta. He will eulogize Vivian Thursday during a service that is limited to 50 people because of COVID-19 precautions. The service will be livestreamed online at 11am ET on the church’s YouTube channel, Facebook and WSB-TV.
On Wednesday, Vivian’s casket rested in the Georgia State Capital building for three hours. Then it was taken by carriage past the offices of the SCLC, Ebenezer Baptist Church, and the crypt where Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King are entombed.
Durley went onto say that, “Vivian was never in the lime light like Martin Luther King, Andrew Young and Ralph Abernathy, but he will be larger in death than life because his message will live on in all of us.”
As Director of Affiliates for the SCLC, it was Vivian’s job to go into segregated towns and set up confrontations with racists in hopes of the national news media highlighting the plight of Black Americans.
“I almost got killed in St. Augustine,” Vivian told me in a 2015 interview for the Washington Post during a 2015 occasion when he was being honored at the Kennedy Center by the D.C. Choral Arts Society.
On June 22, 1964, Vivian and other Civil Rights workers staged a “wade-in” on a segregated beach in St. Augustine, Florida. They were confronted by an angry mob wielding clubs.
Vivian said the protest was all part of the strategy called “nonviolent direct action,” where Civil Rights workers would target known racist and segregated venues across the South to stage a protest.
Cordy Tindell Vivian was born in Boonville, Missouri. As a child, he and his mother moved to Macomb, Illinois, where he attended Lincoln Grade School, Edison Junior High School and Macomb High School, graduating in 1942.
Vivian then attended Western Illinois University in Macomb, where he worked as the sports editor for the school newspaper. He also served as recreation director for the Carver Community Center in Peoria, Illinois. There, he participated in his first sit-in demonstrations, which successfully integrated Barton's Cafeteria in 1947.
Vivian also studied at American Baptist College in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1959, he met James Lawson, who was teaching Mohandas Gandhi's nonviolent direct action strategy to the Nashville Student Movement. Lawson's disciples included activists Diane Nash, Bernard Lafayette, James Bevel, John Lewis and others from American Baptist, Tennessee State and Fisk who organized sit-in campaigns at local lunch counters.
On April 19, 1960, several thousand demonstrators marched on Nashville’s City Hall where Vivian and Diane Nash confronted Nashville Mayor Ben West to admit that racial discrimination was morally wrong.
Vivian would assume a major leadership role in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at the same time when Lewis would become the chair of the group.
On February 16, 1965, Vivian was registering people to vote in Selma, Alabama when he was confronted by a baton-wielding Dallas Country Sheriff Jim Clark and other officers.
In the famous stand-off, Vivian pointed his finger at Clark and said, ”What you’re really trying to do is intimidate these people and by making them stand in the rain keep them from registering to vote.”
After Vivian poked his finger in Clark’s face he ended up with a finger fracture and two weeks later Lewis and other protesters were beat by the Alabama state police in Selma as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge.
On August 8, 2013. President Barack Obama awarded Vivian with the Presidential Medal of Freedom because of his continued work in Civil Rights.
“The family is heartbroken at the loss of our father, but proud of his lifelong work to free America from its tradition of racism, hate and violence," Vivian’s daughter Denise Morse said in a statement. "He loved all mankind and will be missed."
Instead of flowers, the family has for contributions to be made to preserve the C.T. and Octavia Vivian Museum and Archives, Inc.
Rev. Rafael Warnock, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church where Lewis attended also compared Lewis Vivian. “They intentionally used their own bodies so that the nation might be healed.”
In an interview on Fox TV, Martin Luther King III noted that Vivian and Lewis died on the same day in Atlanta their adopted home.
"I guess, in one sense, they wanted to have their last march together,” King said. “Dr. Vivian… stood up to Jim Clark in Selma, Alabama. John Lewis walked over the Edmund Pettus Bridge with Jose Williams and was beaten -- as we just heard once again – profusely.”
Hamil Harris contributes to outlets such as The Washington Post, USA Today, The Christian Chronicle and the Washington Informer. Harris is an Adjunct Professor at the University of Maryland College Park and has been a lecturer at Morgan State University. Harris is minister at the Glenarden Church of Christ and a police chaplain. A longtime reporter at The Washington Post, Harris was on the team of Post reporters that published the series “Being a Black Man.” He also was the reporter on the video project that accompanied the series that won two Emmy Awards, the Casey Medal and the Peabody Award.