C. T. Vivian

Cordy Tindell Vivian was born on the twenty-eighth of July 1924 at Boonville, Missouri, the only child of Robert Cordie Vivian and Euzetta Tindell Vivian. His father died when he was an infant. He was raised by his mother and his maternal grandmother Annie Woods, a domestic worker, in Macomb, Illinois. He completed the bachelor's degree at Western Illinois University in 1946 — among the first African Americans to graduate from the institution — and worked across the following decade as a sports editor at the Carver Community Center newsletter at Peoria, as a high-school basketball coach, and as a stockboy.

He moved to Nashville in 1955 to enrol in the American Baptist Theological Seminary, where he met James Lawson and joined the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference's student nonviolent workshop alongside John Lewis (placed in this archive), Diane Nash and James Bevel. He led with the Nashville group the lunch-counter sit-in operations of February through May 1960 that produced the desegregation of downtown Nashville — six full months before any other southern city was so desegregated. He completed the Bachelor of Divinity in 1961.

He joined the Freedom Rides at Montgomery in May 1961 and was held in the maximum-security wing of the Parchman penitentiary in Mississippi for thirty-nine days. He was appointed to the SCLC executive staff in 1963 by Martin Luther King Jr. (placed in this archive) as director of affiliates, and served Dr. King across the remaining five years of the latter's life as field-organising deputy.

His decisive operational moment was the Selma voter-registration confrontation of the sixteenth of February 1965. Standing at the steps of the Dallas County courthouse with a small group attempting to register, Vivian was struck in the face by Sheriff Jim Clark — the assault, captured by an NBC News camera, was broadcast on the evening news the same day and produced one of the immediate triggers of the Selma-to-Montgomery march that began nineteen days later.

He directed after King's death the National Anti-Klan Network from 1979 — the precursor of the Center for Democratic Renewal — and remained an active SCLC senior figure until shortly before his death at Atlanta on the seventeenth of July 2020, at ninety-five — the same day on which John Lewis died.

He is honored here as the field-organiser of Selma.