Remembering the Reverend C. Herbert Oliver

On November 30, 2021, the Reverend C. Herbert Oliver, a civil rights activist who, as executive secretary of the Inter-Citizens Committee, documented police brutality against African Americans in Alabama in the early 1960s and later fought for public school reform in New York City, passed away at the age of 96.

In 2018, the Gilder Lehrman Institute was honored to have had Rev. Oliver visit the Collection to be interviewed about documents he had a direct hand in creating, particularly his “Report on Birmingham” of September 20, 1963, compiled five days after the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Read about that vital document of the civil rights movement and watch a video of Oliver remembering the events of the era here.

Later in 2018, we featured another segment of Rev. Oliver’s Collection interview in which he recounts his family’s experience with voter suppression in the 1960s.

With the help of Rev. Oliver’s son Claude, we were able to expand our work with the Oliver family in 2019 to benefit students at Brooklyn East Collegiate, a Gilder Lehrman Affiliate School, who were preparing to make a trip to Alabama and surrounding states to study civil rights. Claude Oliver visited the students in their classroom to discuss what it was like to be a young teenager in the household of a major civil rights leader.

We offer our condolences to the Oliver family for their loss and celebrate the life of the Reverend C. Herbert Oliver, who sought to document the history of his time in order to fight its injustices, and whose work continues to inspire future leaders and activists.

For a full obituary, please see this Washington Post remembrance.