In 1968, after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Black students at Colgate-Rochester Divinity School channeled their grief into establishing a Martin Luther King Memorial Chair and Program. They started the funding for the chair and a scholarship program as the nucleus of a Black Church Studies Program. In 1971, with funding from the Irwin Sweeney Miller Foundation of Columbus, Indiana, a group of twenty Black ministers and scholars from across the country were granted fellowships and brought together to a) reflect as a community on the Black Church, b) to put down on paper for the first time an analysis of the Black Church experience, c) to produce a series of books useful in the professional training for ministry in Black Churches and d) to develop a valuable resource for all who trying to develop ministries in the Black community.

Rivers participated in this program as a consultant and to provide Black Catholic representation to the program. He said that, for him, Colgate-Rochester Divinity School's mode for learning and approach to education was very different from any other university experienced he'd had. The Fellows did not work on their doctorates in isolation, despite having individual topics, and he found that process stimulating and educating. Rivers wrote in his Program Summary as a PhD candidate for Union Graduate School that through his contact with this group he began to understand more acutely that Black American culture was a derivative of African culture and that he might want to get a doctorate himself. In 1978, he did earn his own PhD from the Union Graduate School in Yellow Springs, Ohio with a dissertation titled "Black Culture and Religion: Specifically Studying the Synthesis of Afro American Culture and Euro American Worship."