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This @nytimes obituary of @ctvivian covers much of his impactful activism but largely elides what Vivian considered was one of his most formative periods of democratic protest leadership: his Chicago years from 1965-1970. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/17/us/ct-vivian-dead.html
Over 20 years ago, I spent a very memorable day w @ctvivian in his Atlanta home. He invited me to come down because he said people always wanted to know about the southern CRM and MLK but nobody ever asked him about his years in Chicago.
I suspect people ignore @ctvivian's work in Chicago because it does not fit neatly into a liberal civil rights narrative on desegregation in the South. In Chicago, he fused religious, Black Power, and civil rights ideas into radical forms of collective action.
He moved in 1965 to direct a Ford Foundation project at the Urban Training Center for Christian Mission. He transformed it from a place where progressive white clergy met into working-class Black activist center.
Early UTC trainees included Jesse Jackson and James Bevel when they first came to Chicago. But as important was the training of young Black Power and community activists, collaboration with the West Side Organization, and opening dialogue w leaders of African American "gangs."
In the @nytimes obit, it selectively quotes @ctvivian from his 1970 book, Black Power and the American Myth, calling the book an "assessment of the early civil rights movement":
“It was Martin Luther King who removed the Black struggle from the economic realm and placed it in a moral and spiritual context,” he wrote. “It was on this plane that The Movement first confronted the conscience of the nation.”
@ctvivian also wrote: "When we won a battle against segregation, it was like tearing down paper to expose the stone wall behind." And "In order to effect change we would have to create coalitions as massive as the institutions we opposed."
So Black Power and the American Myth was a book that looked backward to advocate for how to move forward into economic justice and to attack institutional racism. The @nytimes obit implies the opposite.
In 1968, Vivian created of the Coalition of United Community Action (CUCA) that organized 50+ community groups into collective action. Their main target was the lily-white building trades because CUCA members saw these jobs as a way out for young, unemployed Black men.
CUCA was a formidable group that included neighborhood orgs, church groups, civil rights orgs, but also the Black Stone Ranger, Vice Lords, and Disciples. They shut down $100s millions of construction projects across Chicago and forced federal action.
If not for an unprecedented wave of repression -- w Chicago Police (incl Red Squad & Gang Intell Unit) and FBI working in tandem -- CUCA may very well have started to restructure the economic institutions of Chicago. Threats, violence, and arrests led the Coalition to come apart.
Last one (I promise): so that's why @ctvivian wanted to discuss Chicago and this explains why a painting of Black Stone Ranger's leader Jeff Fort hung next to a photo of him with MLK in Selma in his living room. They both represented crucial parts of the Black Freedom Movement.
