This is being written as the Examiner.com balloting about America’s heroes comes to a close tonight, Friday, January 27. Ironically, the candidate (in the ‘Sacrifice’ category) about whom I have written, and who was subsequently nominated for a finalist is one of the true pioneers of the entire system of voting in the United States. But Rev. C.T. Vivian, still upbeat and vigilant and active at 87 years of age, wasn’t dealing with an Internet voting procedure when he worked with Martin Luther King back in the 1960s.
In choosing Rev. C.T. Vivian as your choice in the ‘Sacrifice’ section, you can actually vote for a man who gave us all the right to vote.
Rev. Vivian gave of his very blood and flesh, endured jarring blows and prison stays, to make it possible for all Americans to have the ballot—in other words, to share in what we take for granted as a model democracy. Due to his selfless efforts, and his willingness to directly confront—and be beaten by Southern police brutes and KKK cowards—the 1965 Voting Rights Act signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson was further enabled.
“C.T.” is not a large man, physically. His largeness is in his incredible humility. Unlike too many of the other immediate associates of Dr. King, he did not seek nor covet King’s fame and celebrity. He just craved freedom; his moral outrage was about the fact that one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, people in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Georgia were being denied access to the voting booths—by state laws, craven qualification tests that did not apply to white people, and just plain ugly racism.
In choosing Rev. C.T. Vivian as your choice in the ‘Sacrifice’ section, you can actually vote for a man who gave us all the right to vote.
M.L. King believed in the ballot even as he died by the bullet. He declared: “Give us the ballot and we will no longer have to worry the federal government about our basic rights.
Give us the ballot and we will no longer plead to the federal government for passage of an anti-lynching law; we will by the power of our vote write the law on the statute books of the southern states and bring an end to the dastardly acts of the hooded perpetrators of violence.
Give us the ballot and we will transform the salient misdeeds of blood-thirsty mobs into calculated good deeds of orderly citizens. Give us the ballot and we will fill our legislative halls with men of good will.”
His chief lieutenant on the ground, in the hot sun of racist Alabama, was Rev. C.T. Vivian. Read about it again in the original article.
Then ask yourself, how can you not vote for the vote-giver? And would you have been willing to die so others could vote?
Ben Kamin’s next book, ‘ROOM 306: The National Story of the Lorraine Motel,’ will be launched April 4 at the National Civil Rights Museum-Lorraine Motel in Memphis.
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