Civil Rights Icon CT Vivian on Nonviolence & Hypocrisy of US Promoting Democracy Abroad

Read the full interview here.

AMY GOODMAN: Did you stand in front of Sheriff Clark and get punched in the face? 

C. T. VIVIAN: Well, yes, but that’s not why I was standing there. 

AMY GOODMAN: And when he attacked you, especially for young people to understand your thoughts at the time, what went through your mind? 

C. T. VIVIAN: Is that the problem was him. I wasn’t the problem. He was trying to get rid of us, so that he could act as though that the problem was us. The problem is never the person that’s being beat, all right? It’s the person that doesn’t have a reason to beat people and beats people, who hates people and have no reason for it, right? We’ve done nothing. What have we—what have we done to America that they should hate us so, right? We haven’t done it to America. America is—but you can state 30 or 40 things very quickly about what "American democracy," quote-unquote, has done to us. And we were just trying to live for the faith. Died in every war—every war, all right? And yet anybody who came here 10 minutes later was accepted.