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Carlos Zervigon

1953  –  December 12, 2010

Carlos Roy Zervigon, an active participant in the local civil rights movement who traveled the world trying to improve people’s lives, died at Ochsner Health Center of complications of pulmonary fibrosis.

 

“He just cared deeply about other people,” said Kathryn Zervigon, his wife of 43 years. “Any kind of work he was doing, he wanted to be in a position where he was making it better for the people he was working with.”

 

A native New Orleanian, Mr. Zervigon likely started being concerned about inequalities as a child, when he visited Mexican relatives who had settled in Texas and saw how they were treated, his wife said. At Tulane University, where Mr. Zervigon earned a degree in political science, he started becoming active in the Congress of Racial Equality, which was better known as CORE. While he attended demonstrations, such as lunch-counter sit-ins, he didn’t actually sit at any counters because that could have jeopardized his job as a public school teacher, Kathryn Zervigon said. “He was the photographer.”

 

His commitment led him to move to Chicago in 1966 to join the Ecumenical Institute (now the Institute of Cultural Affairs in the U.S.A.), a private, nonprofit, nondenominational organization that combines theology and community work.  Work in that organization took him and his family to such far-flung destinations as the Philippines, Singapore and the jungles of Venezuela until 1977, when he, his wife and their son, Mario, settled in New Orleans.

 

In 1990, he and his wife formed Zervigon International Ltd., which provides management, consulting services and arranges meetings for local, national and international companies. In addition to his work, Mr. Zervigon was active in the Greater New Orleans Federation of Churches. Because Spanish was his first language, he was a translator on Trinity Episcopal Church’s medical missions to Honduras, Mario Zervigon said. He rarely turned anyone down. Once, when a nonprofit organization’s representative asked about hiring his company, his wife recalled that this was her answer: “I’ll agree to it if you promise not to ask him to be on the board.”

 

A member of Rotary International, Mr. Zervigon received the Paul Harris Fellow Award for his service to the organization. Mr. Zervigon was a member of St. Martin’s Episcopal School’s Class of 1956. In 2004, the school gave him the Martin de Tours Award, its highest honor for an alumnus.

 

In addition to his wife and son Mario, survivors include another son, Marcos Zervigon; a daughter, Celia Zervigon Blum; a brother, Luis Zervigon of Austin, Texas; a sister, Anita Zervigon Hakes of Atlanta; and seven grandchildren.