Update: with low-quality page makeup by underpaid workers in Austin, Texas, the insouciant, insipid, uninformative St. Augustine Record carried only AP wire copy, with no mention of Dr. Vivian's attempted murder here in St. Augustine Beach. Typical.
In 1964, the St. Johns County Sheriff was racist Klansman Lawrence O. Davis, removed by the Florida Senate in 1971, but said to have been "exonerated" on the website of Sheriff DAVID SHOAR, whom SHOAR asserts "held the town together," instead of precipitating violence that so repulsed Senator Richard Russell of Georgia that President Lyndon Johnson was able to break the Senate filibuster.
Recall that "St. Augustine Beach Civic Association, Inc. self-appointed leader ROBERT SAMUELS, spouse of then-Commissioner ANDREA SAMUELS, kicked up a fuss in 2016 when I suggested the small museum, saying "We don't need a national park! We don't need a civil rights museum!"
Later that year, endorsed illegally by Sheriff David Shoar on Sheriff's Department letterhead, tatterdemalion termagant St. Augustine Beach Commissioner ANDREA SAMUELS was defeated for re-election in 2016 by Cone Heads ice cream store owner Maggie Kostka, who is now the Vice Mayor of St. Augustine Beach.
From The New York Times:
C.T. Vivian, Civil Rights Leader, Is Dead at 95
A close associate of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he was a disciplined advocate of nonviolence in the battle for racial justice.
The Rev. C. T. Vivian, a pioneering civil rights organizer and field general for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the historic struggle for racial justice a half-century ago, died on Friday at his home in Atlanta. He was 95.
Two of his daughters, Kira Vivian and Denise Morse, confirmed the death. Mr. Vivian had been in hospice care, Ms. Morse said.
In a nation trying to come to grips with racial inequality in the 1960s, Mr. Vivian was a paladin of nonviolence on the front lines of bloody confrontations, leading passive protesters through shrieking white mobs and, with discipline and endurance, absorbing the blows of segregationists and complicit law enforcement officials across the South.
Mr. Vivian was a Baptist minister and a member of Dr. King’s inner circle of advisers, alongside Fred L. Shuttlesworth, Wyatt Tee Walker, Ralph Abernathy and other civil rights luminaries. He was the national director of some 85 local affiliate chapters of the S.C.L.C. from 1963 to 1966, directing protest activities and training in nonviolence, and coordinating voter registration and community development projects.
In Selma and Birmingham, Ala.; St. Augustine, Fla.; Jackson, Miss.; and other segregated cities, Mr. Vivian led sit-ins at lunch counters, boycotts against businesses and marches that continued for weeks or months, raising tensions that often led to mass arrests and harsh repressions.
Televised scenes of marchers attacked by police officers and firefighters with cattle prods, snarling dogs, fire hoses and nightsticks shocked the national conscience, legitimized the civil rights movement and led to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
“Nonviolence is the only honorable way of dealing with social change, because if we are wrong, nobody gets hurt but us,” Mr. Vivian said in an address to civil rights workers, as told in “At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years, 1965-68,” a 2006 book by Taylor Branch. “And if we are right, more people will participate in determining their own destinies than ever before.”
Like his followers, Mr. Vivian was arrested often, jailed and beaten. In 1961, at the end of a violence-plagued, interracial Freedom Ride to Jackson, Mr. Vivian was dispatched to the Hinds County Prison Farm, where he was brutally beaten by guards.
In 1964, Mr. Vivian was nearly killed in St. Augustine, America’s oldest city and one of its most rigidly segregated, where he had joined Dr. King in an extended campaign of peaceful protest. On an Atlantic beach, “roving gangs of whites whipped black bathers with chains and almost drowned C. T. Vivian,” Stephen B. Oates wrote in “Let the Trumpet Sound,” his 1982 biography of Dr. King.
Accompanying Dr. King on a voter-registration drive in 1965, Mr. Vivian confronted Sheriff Jim Clark outside a courthouse in Selma, where 1,400 Black voters had been barred from registering. As television cameras rolled, The New York Times reported, Mr. Vivian asked Sheriff Clark to admit 100 Black people lined up behind him — just to get in out of a lightly falling rain.
Cordy Tindell Vivian was born in Boonville, Mo., on July 30, 1924, the only child of Robert and Euzetta Tindell Vivian. His family moved to Macomb, Ill., when he was 6 and he graduated from Macomb High School in 1942. He studied history at Western Illinois University in Macomb, but he dropped out and became a recreation worker in Peoria, Ill., where he joined his first protest in 1947, helping to desegregate a cafeteria.
In 1952, Mr. Vivian married the former Octavia Geans, the author of “Coretta” (1970), the first biography of Dr. King’s wife, Coretta Scott King. Ms. Vivian died in 2011.
Mr. Vivian is survived by the couple’s children: Denise, Kira, Mark, Anita and Albert. Another son, Cordy Jr., died in 2010.
He is also survived by a daughter, Jo Anna Walker, Denise Morse said.
While studying for the ministry at the American Baptist College in Nashville in 1957, Mr. Vivian joined services at a packed local church and for the first time heard Dr. King speak on nonviolence.
Mr. Vivian “was spellbound,” Mr. Oates recounted in his biography of Dr. King. “He had studied Gandhian techniques, but until now had never understood the philosophy behind them.”
In 1959, Mr. Vivian met the Rev. James Lawson, who was teaching nonviolent strategies to members of the Nashville Student Movement. His students included Diane Nash, Bernard Lafayette, James Bevel and John Lewis, who all became prominent civil rights organizers.
They were also the nucleus of a successful three-month sit-in campaign at lunch counters in Nashville in 1960. As 4,000 protesters marched on City Hall, Mr. Vivian and Ms. Nash confronted Mayor Ben West, who acknowledged that racial discrimination was morally wrong.
“In less than three weeks, the lunch counters were desegregated,” David Halberstam, who covered the campaign for The Nashville Tennessean, wrote later in The Times.
A year after the Nashville campaign, Mr. Vivian replaced an injured member of the Congress of Racial Equality on the Freedom Ride to Mississippi, and submitted to his first beating. It was a fearful experience.
“Going to Mississippi in 1961 was a whole different world,” he said in “King Remembered” (1986) by Flip Schulke and Penelope O. McPhee. “You knew you could easily be killed there.”
After a year as a pastor in Chattanooga, Mr. Vivian helped organize Tennessee’s contingent for the 1963 March on Washington and was invited to join Dr. King’s staff.
Mr. Vivian’s civil rights work continued for a half century. He became director of the Urban Training Center for Christian Mission in Chicago in 1966, and dean of the Shaw University Divinity School in Raleigh, N.C., in 1972.
He later founded the Black Action Strategies and Information Center in Atlanta to foster workplace race relations and was a co-founder of the National Anti-Klan Network, which monitored hate groups and was later renamed the Center for Democratic Renewal to reflect broader educational goals.
He was deputy director for clergy in the 1984 presidential campaign of the Rev. Jesse Jackson, appeared on “Eyes on the Prize” (1987), a 14-part PBS documentary on the civil rights era, and was later the focus of a PBS special, “The Healing Ministry of Dr. C.T. Vivian.”
He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, from President Barack Obama in 2013.
Robert D. McFadden is a senior writer on the Obituaries desk and the winner of the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for spot news reporting. He joined The Times in May 1961 and is also the co-author of two books.
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