He was a civil rights veteran who worked alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and served as head of the organization that was co-founded by the civil rights icon.

The Rev. C.T. Vivian has died after a lifetime of civil rights work that stretched back more than six decades.

He took part in sit-in demonstrations in Illinois in the 1940s, joined Dr. King in the 1955 Montgomery Bus Boycott and received the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013 by then president Barack Obama

Rev. Vivian died at his home in Atlanta early this morning of natural causes,

He was 95.