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Bernard LaFayette, the advance man who did the risky groundwork for the voter registration campaign in Selma, Alabama, that culminated in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, has died.
Bernard LaFayette III said his father died Thursday morning of a heart attack. He was 85.
On 7 March 1965, the beating of future congressman John Lewis and voting rights marchers on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge led the evening news, shocking the nation’s conscience and pushing Congress to act. But two years before “Bloody Sunday”, it was LaFayette who quietly set the stage for Selma and the advances in voting rights that would follow.
LaFayette was one of a delegation of Nashville students who in 1960 helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which organized desegregation and voting rights campaigns across the south. SNCC crossed Selma off its map after some initial scouting determined “the white folks were too mean and the Black folks were too scared”, LaFayette said.
But he insisted on trying anyway. Named director of the Alabama voter registration campaign in 1963, LaFayette moved to the town and, with his former wife, Colia Liddell, gradually built the leadership capacity of the local people, convincing them change was possible and creating momentum that could not be stopped. He described this work in a 2013 memoir, In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma.
The many dangers LaFayette faced included an assassination attempt on the same night Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi, in what the FBI said was a conspiracy to kill civil rights workers.
LaFayette was already working on a new project in Chicago by the time his work in Selma came to fruition in 1965. He had planned to join the Selma-to-Montgomery march on day two, so he missed Bloody Sunday when the march was stopped by teargas and club-wielding state troopers before it even got out of Selma.
He shifted quickly, rounding up people in Chicago and arranging transport to Alabama for a second attempt. They set off two weeks later on what had become a victory march: President Lyndon Johnson had introduced the Voting Rights Act to Congress.
LaFayette grew up in Tampa, Florida, where he recalled trying to board a trolley with his grandmother when he was seven years old. Black passengers had to pay at the front, then walk to the back to climb on. But the conductor began to pull away before they could board, and his grandmother fell. He was too little to help.
“I felt like a sword cut me in half, and I vowed I would do something about this problem one day,” he wrote in his memoir.
It was his grandmother who decided he was destined to become a preacher. She arranged for him to attend Nashville’s American Baptist Theological Seminary (now American Baptist College), where he roomed with Lewis, and both helped lead the nonviolent civil disobedience campaign that led to Nashville becoming the first major southern city to desegregate its downtown accommodations.
Freedom Rides of 1961
In 1961, LaFayette dropped out of college in the middle of final exams to join an official Freedom Ride, one of many that sought to force southern authorities to comply with the court’s ruling. He was beaten in Montgomery, Alabama, and arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, becoming one of more than 300 freedom riders sent to Parchman prison.
LaFayette later trained Black youth to become leaders in the Chicago freedom movement and helped organize tenant unions.
“The tenant protections we have today are really a direct outcome of that work in Chicago,” said Mary Lou Finley, a professor emeritus at Antioch University Seattle who worked with LaFayette in Chicago in the 1960s.
LaFayette also worked alongside Andrew Young and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to prepare for the Martin Luther King Jr’s ill-fated northern campaign. Several of King’s marches were attacked by white mobs, but LaFayette and Young challenged the notion that the Chicago movement was a failure.
By 1968, LaFayette was the national coordinator of King’s poor people’s campaign and was with King at the Lorraine motel on the morning of his assassination. King’s last words to him were about the need to institutionalize and internationalize the nonviolence movement. LaFayette made this his life’s mission.
After King died, LaFayette returned to American Baptist to complete his bachelor’s degree and then earned a master’s and doctorate from Harvard University. He later served as director of peace and justice in Latin America as chair of the Consortium on Peace Research, Education and Development; director of the Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies at the University of Rhode Island; distinguished senior scholar-in-residence at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University; and minister of the Westminster presbyterian church in Tuskegee, Alabama, among other positions.
“Bernard did work in Latin America. He did nonviolence workshops in South Africa with the African national congress. He went to Nigeria when the civil war was happening there,” Young said. “Bernard literally went everywhere he was invited as sort of a global prophet of nonviolence.”
In his memoir, LaFayette wrote that the ever-present threat of death during those early years of organizing taught him that the value of life “lies not in longevity, but in what people do to give it significance”.
