While less well known than several of his contemporaries, the Reverend Cordy Tindell Vivian (1924–2020) played a crucial role in many of the nation’s civil rights struggles, from his youth in Peoria, Illinois, to his final years working in Atlanta, Georgia.
Known simply by his initials “C.T.,” Vivian was a confidant of Martin Luther King Jr. (who called him “the greatest preacher to ever live”) and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama in 2013. Vivian passed away just two weeks shy of his ninety-sixth birthday and on the same day as his longtime friend and fellow civil rights activist John Lewis.
"It’s in the Action: Memories of a Nonviolent Warrior," By C.T. Vivian with Steve Fiffer, NewSouth Books, 208 pages, Publication date: March 16, 2021
A new book provides valuable insights into Vivian’s life and beliefs. It’s in the Action, by C.T. Vivian with Steve Fiffer, takes its title from a favorite Vivian quote: “Martin taught us that it’s in the action that we find out who we really are.”
Bernard LaFayette, a colleague of Vivian in the 1960 Nashville Student Movement and currently chair of the board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (where Vivian also held various leadership roles) agrees: “The thing about him, he didn’t just talk and make speeches, he was an activist. He put his body on the line. He spoke with everything he had, including his feet. Yeah, his feet had a message. They marched.”
One famous archival film clip shows Vivian confronting Alabama Sheriff Jim Clark on the steps of the courthouse in Selma on February 15, 1965. After being punched and knocked down by Clark, Vivian gets up, nonviolently, and continues his statement. The story of this incident, as well as so many others from early movement actions, make up the first part of this rich collection.
The book also tells the story of Vivian’s time in Chicago, beginning in 1966 (concurrent with King’s move to that city), when Vivian trained ministers in the Urban Training Center, an ecumenical effort; he was working there when King was assassinated on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee.
During his time in Chicago, Vivian also wrote his only solo publication: Black Power and the American Myth, which was reissued this year in a fiftieth anniversary commemorative edition. Published in January 1970, the book was radical in its time, keenly addressing issues of the failures of the movement. “Having assumed that integration would be the principle of our success,” Vivian wrote, “we accepted the corollary proposition that the basic hindrance we faced was legal segregation.”
"Black Power and the American Myth," By C.T. Vivian, Fortress Press, 136 pages, Fiftieth anniversary edition, republished February 2, 2021
In the end, he declared, legal remedies were not enough: “We began to see that we were not dealing with a legal matter, but with a sickness, the disease of racism.”
This book, though a half-century old, seems prophetic today as the Black Lives Matter movement brings racial injustice to the forefront of a national dialogue again.
It’s in the Action is, at its heart, a memoir of a life of struggle, action, and compassion. Fiffer, a writer who lives in Evanston, Illinois, worked to bring the project to fruition. Sadly, much of Vivian’s later life and work could only be assembled from existing interview sources.
“We were moving chronologically [through his life] and age was catching up with him, and it was difficult to put together some of the later material,” Fiffer says in a phone interview. There were many questions, he laments, “we never had the opportunity to discuss in depth.”