PEORIA MAGAZINE February 2023

said to have called Vivian “the greatest preacher that ever lived.” He participated in the Freedom Rides and took major leadership roles in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He developed the Alabama educational program that became known as Upward Bound. Vivian published Black Power and the American Myth in 1970 and continued as a champion of civil rights for the rest of his life. He founded the C. T. Vivian Leadership Institute in 2008 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama in 2013. Vivian died in 2020 in Atlanta, at age 95. It’s no surprise that Vivian’s oldest daughter, Jo Jo, a retired Peoria art educator, is “very proud. “Education was always praised in our whole family,” she said, adding that the name change was a fitting one. “Daddy continued the same work upholding the rights of those that Jefferson left out.”

DR. MAUDE A. SANDERS PRIMARY SCHOOL, 1907 W. FOREST HILL AVE. Maude A. Sanders was Peoria’s first Black female doctor. Born in 1903 in NewOrleans, Sanders was the youngest of 10 children. She attended Xavier and New Orleans universities, then medical school in Nashville. After starting a medical practice in St. Louis, she moved to Peoria in 1942. As no local hospitals would give her office space or provide medical care for Black patients, she

opened a practice above an automotive garage. Sanders retired in 1990 at age 89. Up until her death in 1995, she continued to help Blacks and poor whites get the medical care they needed but were often denied due to discriminatory practices and poverty.

Scott Fishel is a senior communications executive at WTVP

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54 FEBRUARY 2023 PEORIA MAGAZINE