Month: July 2020

Cordy Tindell Vivian (July 30, 1924 – July 17, 2020) a giant who walked among us..This loss hurts..Cordy Tindell Vivian was born July 30, 1924..He was one of those people who you heard about long before you ever met him ..and I remember well the first time I met him at a “Young Peoples brigade” meeting in 1964.in Atlanta…I expected him to be kind of scary..and not very approachable ..nothing was farther from the truth..He had a wonderful laugh..and a joke all the time..The main thing about “CT” as we all called him was he had a profound understanding of the moment..The time we were in ..and almost always defended the place of young people in the movement..He knew that just getting a civil rights bill or when we got the voting rights act that the struggle would still have a long way to go and what we did in that time would not just define the movement…but define us as people for the rest of our lives. I was about 15 when he told me that Hosea Williams was going to make sure some teens from Atlanta would be at the march in Selma in March of 65.the one that became known as
Bloody Sunday…”CT” always made sure we knew why we were there…what was at stake and that anybody with the “brains god gave a chicken” would be afraid ..but that we were in this not just for us but for any children we might have..Few of those early giants took as much time to get young people to understand what our participation in the movement meant as CT. Years later when we set up the Free Breakfast Program with the Black Panther Party in Atlanta..CT was there on the first day..mainly to make sure people knew that there would be no lack of love between the different arms of the movement..and that he was proud of me…In 1969 that meant the world to me .I last saw him in 1996 when I was in Atlanta to bury my mother ..He knew my mother from her work in the fifties with the “March of Dimes”..You may not have known his name ..but we still feel the results of his work today..Cordy Tindell Vivian (July 30, 1924 – July 17, 2020) a giant.