Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Civil rights figure inspires Coatesville crowd
CALN — A lengthy airport delay and bad traffic didn’t slow down civil rights icon C.T. Vivian when he arrived at Coatesville Area Senior High Friday night, for a speech sponsored by the school district and local chapter of the NAACP.
The 88-year-old Freedom Rider got there over an hour after the originally scheduled start time, but he brought 90 minutes of information and motivation to the microphone for the standing-room-only crowd in the school’s auditorium. The first half-hour was a discussion with Dan Williams, senior pastor at New Life in Christ Fellowship, followed by an hour of questions from audience members.
During his nonviolent, anti-segregation activities in the South during the 1960s, Vivian said, he was jailed, beaten and nearly drowned. Despite facing potential violence or even death, Vivian said those dedicated to the cause shook off the thought that any protest could be their last.
“You come the point that it doesn’t matter to you whether it is or not,” Vivian said. “What you’re about is what you were born for, and every one of us was born to help each other be free.”
A close friend of Martin Luther King Jr., Vivian said King was the perfect leader, more for of his plan of action than his legendary words of inspiration.
“The great leaders were not only great speakers, but they also came forward with a strategy,” Vivian said. “Martin came forward because he really had it all.”
One audience member asked if King would feel his dream had been fulfilled.
“Yes, his part of it,” Vivian said. “The question is whether we have learned from his activity and his making us who we are, that we can react and do the same basic stuff for other people that he did for us.”
On a local level, Vivian was asked if he had met West Chester native and fellow civil rights activist Bayard Rustin.
“Bayard was one of the brightest guys we had, and he also started 20 years before most of us,” Vivian said. “He suffered more than others, because he wasn’t only black, he was gay. In jail, it was always harder on Bayard than the rest of us.
“He was very cultured and unusual. I actually have an album of him singing folk songs.”
On gay rights, Vivian said his thought process has always been simple.
“My question is, ‘Are they human?’” Vivian said. “If they are, what’s the problem?”
Vivian said that while the election of Barack Obama as the country’s first black president was significant, black people still have a long way to go after “being placed behind from the beginning.”
“The only way to be fully human is to be fully free,” Vivian said. “We won’t be truly free in this country until we are in charge of it. That doesn’t mean running roughshod over anybody. It means that we’re going to have an equal chance of everything.”