Bernard LaFayette, Selma voting rights organizer, dies at 85

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Bernard LaFayette, the trailblazing man who laid the risky ground for the voter registration drive in Selma, Alabama, that resulted in 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 years old.

On March 7, 1965, the beating of future Congressman John Lewis and voting rights demonstrators on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma made the evening news, shocking the conscience of the nation and spurring 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 part of a delegation of Nashville students who in 1960 helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which organized desegregation and voting rights campaigns throughout the South. SNCC wiped Selma off its map after initial research determined that “the whites were too mean and the blacks too scared,” LaFayette said.

But he still insisted on trying. Appointed director of Alabama’s voter registration drive in 1963, LaFayette moved to the city and, with his ex-wife Colia Liddell, gradually built the leadership capacity of local people, convincing them that change was possible and building momentum that could not be stopped. He described this work in his 2013 memoir, “In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma.”

Among the many dangers LaFayette faced was an assassination attempt the same night Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi, part of what the FBI said was a plot to kill civil rights workers. LaFayette was beaten outside his home before his attacker pointed a gun at him. His cries for help brought a neighbor armed with a gun. LaFayette found himself between the two men, asking his neighbor not to shoot.

LaFayette said he felt “an extraordinary sense of inner strength instead of fear” at that moment. Rather than fight back, he looked his attacker in the eyes. Nonviolence is a fight “to convince this person, a fight of the human spirit,” he writes.

He also admitted that it may have been his neighbor’s gun that saved his life.

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 march from Selma to Montgomery on the second day, so he missed Bloody Sunday when the march was stopped by tear gas and baton-wielding state troopers before it even left Selma.

“I felt powerless from a distance,” he wrote. “I was struck with grief, worried that so many people in my beloved community had been injured, even killed. »

But he responded quickly, gathering people in Chicago and arranging transportation to Alabama for a second attempt. Two weeks later, they embarked on what became a victory march: President Lyndon Johnson had introduced the Voting Rights Act into Congress.

LaFayette grew up in Tampa, Florida, where he remembers trying to board a streetcar with his grandmother when he was 7 years old. Black passengers had to pay at the front and then walk toward the back to board. But the driver started to drive away before they could get in, and her grandmother fell. He was too small to help.

“I felt like a sword was cutting me in two, and I vowed to do something to solve 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 American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville (now American Baptist College), where he roomed with Lewis, and the two helped lead the nonviolent civil disobedience campaign that led Nashville to become the first major Southern city to desegregate its inner-city lodgings.

President Barack Obama spoke about the roommates in a eulogy after Lewis’ death in 2020, recalling how they boarded a Greyhound bus while heading home for the Christmas holidays (from Lewis to Troy, Alabama and from LaFayette to Tampa, Florida) just weeks after the Supreme Court banned segregation in interstate travel in 1960.

The two men sat in the front and refused to move, angering the driver, who rushed to every stop, all night.

“Imagine the courage of these two people … to challenge an entire infrastructure of oppression,” Obama said. “No one was there to protect them. There was no camera crew to record the events.”

LaFayette said they didn’t fully realize the impact of all this work at the time.

“We lived through it, but it was our daily life,” he told The Associated Press in a 2021 interview. “When you think about it, we weren’t trying to write history or rewrite history. We were responding to the issues of a particular time.”

In 1961, LaFayette dropped out in the middle of final exams to join an official Freedom Ride, one of several 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 then trained black youth to become leaders of the Chicago Freedom Movement and helped organize tenants’ unions.

“The tenant protections we have today are actually a direct result of that work in Chicago,” said Mary Lou Finley, a professor emeritus at Antioch University in Seattle who worked with LaFayette in Chicago in the 1960s.

And when he learned that one of his secretaries had two children affected by lead — a huge problem that was not well understood at the time — Lafayette organized high school students to screen toddlers for lead poisoning by collecting urine samples, and pushed Chicago to help develop the nation’s first mass lead poisoning screening, Finley said.

“Bernard always worked quietly behind the scenes,” said Finley, who later collaborated with LaFayette on nonviolence training. “He avoided the spotlight. In some ways, I think he felt like he could do more if he did it quietly.”

LaFayette also worked alongside Andrew Young and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to prepare for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s ill-fated campaign in the North. Several of King’s marches were attacked by white mobs, but LaFayette and Young disputed the notion that the Chicago movement was a failure.

Young noted in a 2021 interview that in Chicago, they were trying to organize a population 20 times larger than Birmingham’s, while tackling a range of difficult issues, from neighborhood integration to the quality of schools and jobs. “In each of these areas we have made progress,” Young said.

In 1968, LaFayette was the national coordinator of King’s pro-poor campaign and was with King at the Lorainne Motel the morning of his assassination. King’s final words to him focused on the need to institutionalize and internationalize the nonviolent movement. LaFayette made it her life’s mission.

After King’s death, LaFayette returned to American Baptist to complete his bachelor’s degree, then earned a master’s and doctorate from Harvard University. LaFayette later served as director of Peace and Justice in Latin America; President of the Consortium on Research, Education and Development for Peace; director of the Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies at the University of Rhode Island; Distinguished Senior Scholar in Residence at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta; and minister of the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Tuskegee, Alabama, among other positions.

“Bernard worked in Latin America with violent groups there. He did workshops on nonviolence in South Africa with the African National Congress. He visited Nigeria when the civil war was going on there,” Young said. “Bernard literally went wherever he was invited as a sort of global prophet of non-violence. »

DeMark Liggins, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said Thursday that LaFayette’s “legacy lies in the thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people he helped in America and abroad.”

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 meaning.”