Vivian passed away Friday at her Atlanta home of natural causes.
“He was the sweetest man,” said Kira Vivian. “He was so loving. What a loving father. He was the best father my entire life.”
He was born in Boonville, Missouri, on July 30, 1924. He and his late wife, Octavia Geans Vivian, had six children.
Vivian had a strong religious upbringing and said she felt called to life in ministry, according to NVLP. With the help of his church, he enrolled at the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville in 1955.
That same year, he and other ministers founded the Nashville Christian Leadership Conference, an affiliate of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, NVLP said. The group helped organize the city’s first sit-ins and the civil rights march.
Vivian also created a college readiness program to help “care for children who were expelled from school simply because they protested racism.”
Years later, the US Department of Education used its Vision program as a guide to creating Upward Bound, which was designed to improve high school and college graduation rates for students in underserved communities.
In the late 1970s, Vivian founded the National Anti-Klan Network, an anti-racist organization that focused on monitoring the Ku Klux Klan. Shortly after its founding, the name and address changed because “it was bigger than the Klan,” Vivian said. “We call it the Center for Democratic Renewal because the whole culture had to be renewed if it was really going to be democratic.” Vivian said they saw the Center for Democratic Renewal as “the political side” of what they were doing with the SCLC, which focused on the country’s moral struggles during the civil rights movement.
President Barack Obama awarded Vivian the highest civilian honor in the nation, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, in 2013.
About his father, Kira Vivian said, “He was just a kind person and cared about people.”
CNN’s Alta Spells contributed to this report.
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