C.T. Vivian Passed Away!

Civil rights leader C.T. Vivian passed away.

A trusted advisor to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. passed away on Friday at the age of 95.

The Rev. C.T. Vivian, a civil rights veteran who worked alongside King and later led the Southern Christian Leadership Conference passed away.

Vivian passed away at his home in Atlanta of natural causes. His friend and business partner Don Rivers confirmed the news to the junk food media.

His civil rights work goes back more than six decades. He was first to start sit-ins in Peoria, Illinois at a restaurant. He met King soon after the young reverend led the march on Montgomery.

That led to the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott which helped build the legacy of Rosa Parks.

Vivian organized the Freedom Rides to integrate buses across the South and trained activists to stand proud in the face of opposition. He led a lot of non-violent protests and was one of the many protesters who got sidewalk by the Selma Police when he, King and John Lewis (now U.S. Representative, Democrat from Georgia) crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

Cordy Tindell Vivian was an American minister, author, and was a close friend and lieutenant of Martin Luther King Jr. during the Civil Rights Movement. Vivian continued to reside in Atlanta, Georgia, and founded the C. T. Vivian Leadership Institute, Inc. He was a member of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity.

President Barack Obama, speaking at the occasion of the anniversary of Selma to Montgomery marches in March 2007 at Selma's Brown Chapel A.M.E., recognized Vivian in his opening remarks in the words of Martin L. King Jr. as "the greatest preacher to ever live."

Vivian had fond memories of his childhood and adolescence in Macomb, a small town in west-central Illinois with an even smaller black population. He was involved in almost every aspect of his community and school, working side-by-side with his white peers.

Vivian said even in his childhood, he was keenly aware of the racial barriers that existed throughout the country.

Barack Obama honored C.T. Vivian for his courage.

"I don't remember a time that I didn't understand the black situation, [that] the dilemma was not real to me," Vivian said in 2006. "At the same time, I was so accepted in my community that only in the social life did I not participate."

After graduating from Macomb High School and then Western Illinois University, Vivian moved to Peoria, Illinois, to work as the assistant boy's director for the Carver Community Center. The years Vivian spent in Peoria would shape the rest of his life: There he met and married his wife of more than 50 years, got involved in the civil rights movement and joined the ministry.

Octavia Geans had taken a job at the Carver Community Center to help with the women's programs.

"My life really began with my wife," Vivian said. He often called her "baby" and proudly showed her portrait to visitors to his art- and book-filled Cascade home.

He also credits Octavia with encouraging him to join the ministry.

Vivian said the call to join the ministry came to him one day while he was working at the Foster & Gallagher mail-order company in Peoria.

"I'm walking across the warehouse floor -- a big, oval kind of thing. Suddenly it seems like the whole thing opened up, and I hear the voice of God saying to me, 'Work for me 12 to 14 hours per day.' I'm completely startled. I turn all around me because I wonder how everyone else is taking this. And they're just working away. It was just beyond me, but I knew it was my call to ministry."

Leaders of a movement.

Vivian left his young family behind to begin his religious studies in Nashville, Tennessee. There, he grew more involved in the burgeoning civil rights movement.

In Peoria, he and other colleagues had read the pamphlets and other materials on nonviolent direct action, published by CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality. They joined lunch-counter sit-ins and other demonstrations. But Vivian was drawn deeper into the movement when he moved to Nashville.

In Tennessee, he met and worked with other young men and women who also would become famous for their efforts in the movement, leaders such as Bernard Lafayette and John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

In 1965, already active in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he traveled to Selma, Alabama, to participate in one of the most important events in the civil rights movement.

"One of the reasons I came to Selma and got involved with Dr. King at that level was because I talked to C.T. Vivian, and he asked me to come down," said the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson Sr.