New SCLC VP predicts King strategy will bring surge for Obama

17th January 2012   ·   0 Comments

By Hazel Trice Edney
Contributing Writer

(TriceEdneyWire.com) — No great movement in America’s history has ever taken only a few years. Whether it was the movement from slavery to freedom, the women’s rights movement, the voting rights movement, the civil rights movement, it took time and diligence. That has not changed with the work of the nation’s first Black president.

This sentiment comes from someone who knows well the pace of movements in America. The Rev. C. T. Vivian, an 88-year-old civil rights pioneer who was a close friend and lieutenant of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., helped to strategize the movement for African-American civil rights. Moreover, as the newly elected vice president of Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Vivian predicts that the second wave of that movement is about to surge.

“About every 30 to 35 years, there’s a new movement in this country,” he explains in an interview with the Trice Edney News Wire a day before a press conference to announce his new role. “The civil rights movement was the last one. The one before that was the labor movement…Somewhere between 35 and 40 years, there’s always a new people’s movement…This time, it’s the continuation of the civil rights movement.”

The strengthening of health care, education, and economics are just a few of the issues involved in the unfinished business that Vivian indicates would continue with a second term of the presidency of Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president. But, it will take work, he says. African Americans will have to move.

“We are the change agents for America,” he said. “When Martin moved, everybody followed us. The new women’s movement came in, the youth movement came in, the old folks moved – everybody who had not been getting justice — the gay movement came. They were all coming on the basis of what Martin laid down. And every one of them knew that, ‘If Black people can win who have been treated like they’ve been treated and at the bottom of the ladder, then we can have our rights as well.’ And they did, one after the another, all of these organizations moved.”

Despite the absence of a Dr. King in 2012, such a groundswell is still possible based on the momentum and the groundwork that’s been laid, Vivian says. He points to the work that’s begun by the Obama administration. From Obama’s historic health care bill to what appears to be a creeping turn-around in the economy, a wave of energy from coalitions of people who have been historically left out could bring about the fullness of change that could come with four more years, Vivian said.

“We are now coming together to move. All of these people know that they got theirs because we fought ours. And anybody who thinks that they’re going to stop some combination of Latins and Blacks and Jews and old folks and gays — if they think they can stop that — let them try.”

Vivian assumes his new role after several tumultuous years of inner struggles and court battles over leadership of the SCLC, which was founding by Dr. King in 1957. Vivian says the organization is forcefully re-emerging. He once worked as the national director of affiliates for the organization and will now share the helm with King’s nephew, Isaac Newton Farris Jr., 48, who rose to the presidency after the sudden death of the Rev. Howard Creecy Jr., another civil rights stalwart, last summer. Farris has been working to rebuild the organization alongside other veterans, including Bernard LaFayette Jr., a King lieutenant who now serves as board chairman.

Vivian says he will work as a mentor, advisor and strategist alongside Farris and coalitions of college students because of his decades of experience in “the kinds of things that are basic to movements.”

Those tenets can be as simple and powerful as coalitions between youth and seasoned leaders.

“Black people are very practical. We’ve got to be. Our history has forced us to be practical…Someone said to Martin one time, a newsman, and he was asking, ‘How many members do you have?’ And he was suggesting, ‘Well that doesn’t represent much of Black America’ when Martin said, ‘We don’t operate through membership. We operate knowing that if we’re right, people will follow us.’

“It’s that kind of greatness that we represent and people moved all over this nation because Martin represented something that worked. This is what we always go with — what works, what helps deliver us…And, as a result, we changed this nation. It’s not just getting the message out. It’s that the SCLC represents action. Remember, it was Martin King that brought action to the scene.”

Vivian concedes that the SCLC is not allowed to endorse Obama as president because federal law prohibits non-profit organizations to involve themselves in partisan politics. But, he adds, that doesn’t preclude the organization from fulfilling its historic mission of leading and building diverse communities by speaking out on key issues and giving credit where it is due.

“I remember the Great Depres­sion. And as a result of remembering the Great Depres­sion, I can really know how great a job he has done already because it took FDR [Franklin Delano Roosevelt] years to do what he has done in a short length of time.”

He concludes, “We’re bringing the organization back to where it belongs. We’re bringing it back to active participation on the American scene once again and at a time of great need.”

This article was originally published in the January 16, 2012 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper