Photojournalist Rivera dies at 95

Alex Rivera of Durham, a retired photojournalist who covered the civil rights movement and created the public relations office at N.C. Central University, died Thursday night. He was 95.

"This is a sad day for NCCU," Chancellor Charlie Nelms said today in a prepared statement. "Not only was Mr. Rivera an integral part of the university's history, he made invaluable contributions to the world."

Rivera was also recognized in Durham, which he described in a 1949 article for Ebony magazine, titled "Wall Street of Negro America." Earlier this year, Rivera was honored as a Living Legend in Durham, and the Fayetteville Street house where he once lived has been declared of "historic significance" statewide.

The state museum of history held an exhibit of Rivera photographs last winter.

A native of Greensboro whose father, Alexander M. Rivera Sr., was an active member of the NAACP, the younger Rivera worked for several of the nation's most prominent black newspapers. He left the Washington (D.C.) Tribune in 1939, at the invitation of NCCU founder James Shepard, to establish a news bureau at the school.

After Naval Intelligence service in World War II, Rivera covered Virginia and the Carolinas as correspondent for the Pittsburgh Courier and National Negro Press Association. He reported on the last lynchings in South Carolina and Georgia, and the Yanceyville trial of a black man charged with "reckless eyeballing" of a white woman in 1951.

He covered a South Carolina lawsuit that became part of the landmark Brown v. Board Supreme Court ruling that outlawed racial discrimination in public schools, and in the wake of Brown vs. Board of Education, Rivera traveled 1,700 miles to record Southern reactions to that Supreme Court ruling for desegregation.

That coverage won him an award from the Global News Network; then-U.S. Vice President Richard Nixon attended the presentation and later, invited Rivera to accompany him to the independence celebration in Ghana.

Rivera returned to Durham as NCCU's public relations director in 1974. In 2005, the university named its sports hall of fame in his honor.