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A Powerful Flame That Burned Brightly
Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from the book My C. T. Vivian Story: A Powerful Flame That Burned Brightly by Living Now Bronze Medal-winning author Harold Michael Harvey
I first became aware of C. T. Vivian, February 19, 1965, on the CBS Evening News. Dallas County, Alabama Sheriff Jim Clark sucker-punched him after Vivian told Sheriff Clark that he thought he was as big a racist as Hitler. In the next breath, Vivian told Clark that he was not as big a racist as Hitler. I was 14 years old, perplexed by Jim Crow, and worried that Blacks, including myself, would never be free in America. A never-dying Jim Crowism was the daunting thought of my youth.
Two days later, February 21, 1965, I would meet Malcolm X via a news break during a Boston Celtics basketball game that announced Malcolm’s death in the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem. I was bewildered, a freedom fighter whose life force I did not know had died, and another one received a punch to the jaw exercising his constitutional right of expression on a courthouse step.
Fifty-four years in the future, I still have my doubts about the free status of Blacks living in America. Vivian absorbed that punch, and with 55 years’ worth of perspective, we can say that his work has brought us closer to that promised land foretold by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. the night before King departed…
