When C.T. Vivian was growing up in McComb, Ill., one of his favorite
places was the local library. All of the librarians knew him and eagerly
fed his reading habit.
Few blacks actually used the McComb library then, and they found even fewer books there that were written for or about them.
“Nowhere in town was there a place to really know who we were as a black person,” said the 93-year-old civil rights icon and Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient. “You had to find out by accident.”
Once such accident was young Vivian’s discovery of a book on a high
shelf at the library. The title is lost to him now, but he has never
forgotten the book, which chronicled the lives of extraordinary black
men and women.
“That was the only book in that library that was totally black,” Vivian. “We were always seen through the eyes of whites.”
It was at that point that the future civil rights leader became a
collector. A collector of books largely about the black experience and
written by black authors. Over nearly 80 years, Vivian has amassed a
collection of more than 6,000 volumes, including first editions, by the
likes of Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes and W.E.B. Du Bois. Some are
signed, like a copy of Phillis Wheatley’s 1773 “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral,” the first known book authored by an African-American woman.
“Dad
reads all the time,” said Vivian’s daughter, Denise Morse. “Growing up,
we had books everywhere. On every table, stacked in the corners. He and
mom would get in a car and drive to California, stopping at little
bookstores along the way. They would come home with a trunk load of
books.”
The question now is what to do with the collection. And the city of Atlanta and a local developer have come up with an answer.
Vivian is donating his collection to the National Monuments Foundation
for inclusion in the Peace Column, the centerpiece of the upcoming
Rodney Cook Sr. Park in Vine City. The C.T. Vivian Library will be
housed within the base of the 110-foot column.
“C.T.’s library is
the gravitas for the Peace Column Museum that gives it its anchor,” said
Rodney Cook Jr., the CEO of the National Monuments Foundation and the
son of the park’s namesake.
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