Atlanta Journal-Constitution: C.T. Vivian’s vast collection of books to anchor library in his honor

  C.T. Vivian looks through a book at his home library on Tuesday, July 25, 2017.

(Hyosub Shin / The Atlanta Journal-Constitution) 

By Ernie Suggs - 

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Wednesday, July 26, 2017

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.