NASHVILLE, TN– Bernard Lafayette, the forward man who did the risky groundwork for the voter registration drive 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 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 prompting Congress to act. But two years before “Bloody Sunday” came out, it was Lafayette who quietly paved the way for Selma and the advances in voting rights that would follow.
Lafayette was one of a delegation of Nashville students that in 1960 helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which organized desegregation and voting rights campaigns throughout the South. SNCC deleted Ladder from its map after some initial exploration found that “the white people were very mean and the black people were very afraid,” Lafayette said.
But he insisted on trying anyway. Appointed director of the Alabama Voter Registration Campaign in 1963, Lafayette moved to the city and, along with his former wife Kolya Liddell, gradually built the leadership capacity of local residents, convincing them that change was possible and creating unstoppable momentum. He described this work in his 2013 memoir, “In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma.”
The many dangers Lafayette faced included an assassination attempt on the same night that Medgar Evers was killed in Mississippi, in 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 calls for help brought out a neighbor with a rifle. Lafayette found himself standing between the two men, asking his neighbor not to shoot.
Lafayette said he felt “an extraordinary sense of inner strength rather than fear” in that moment. Instead of fighting, he looked his attacker in the eyes. Nonviolence, he wrote, is a struggle “to win this person, which is the struggle of the human spirit.”
He also admitted that his neighbor’s gun may have saved his life.
Lafayette was already working on a new project in Chicago when he started his work in Selma in 1965. He had planned to join the Selma to Montgomery march on the second day, so he missed Bloody Sunday when the march was stopped by tear gas and baton-wielding state troopers before it exited Selma.
“I felt helpless from a distance,” he wrote. “I was saddened, and worried that so many people in my beloved community were being harmed, and possibly killed.”
But he turned around quickly, rounding up people in Chicago and arranging transportation to Alabama for a second try. Two weeks later they set out on what became a victory march: President Lyndon Johnson introduced the Voting Rights Act to Congress.
Lafayette grew up in Tampa, Florida, where he remembers trying to ride a wagon with his grandmother when he was 7 years old. Black passengers had to pay at the front, then walk to the back to board. But the conductor started walking away before they could get on, and his grandmother fell. He was too young to help.
“I felt like a sword had cut me in half,” he wrote in his memoirs, “and I swore that one day I would do something about this problem.”
It was his grandmother who decided that 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 they both helped lead the nonviolent civil disobedience campaign that led to Nashville becoming the first major Southern city to desegregate downtown housing.
President Barack Obama spoke about the roommates in a eulogy after Lewis’ death in 2020, recalling how they packed a Greyhound bus as they returned home for the Christmas holiday (from Lewis to Troy, Alabama, and from Lafayette to Tampa, Florida) just weeks after the Supreme Court banned racial segregation in interstate travel in 1960.
The two sat in the front and refused to move, angering the driver who drove off at every stop throughout the night.
“Imagine the courage of these two people…to challenge an entire infrastructure of oppression,” Obama said. “There was no one 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 this, but this was our daily life,” he told The Associated Press in a 2021 interview. “When you think about it, we weren’t trying to make history or trying to rewrite it. We were responding to the problems of a particular time.”
In 1961, Lafayette left college in the middle of final exams to join the 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 young black men to become leaders in 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.
When he learned that one of his secretaries had two children sickened by lead — a major problem that was not well understood at the time — Lafayette organized high school students to screen young children for lead poisoning by collecting urine samples, and he urged Chicago to help develop the nation’s first mass screening for lead poisoning, 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 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. Many of King’s marches were attacked by white mobs, but Lafayette and Young challenged the idea 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 pursuing a range of difficult issues, from neighborhood integration to the quality of schools and jobs. “We’ve made progress in every one of those experiments,” Young said.
By 1968, Lafayette was the national coordinator of the King Poor People’s Campaign and was with King at the Lorraine Hotel on the morning of his assassination. King’s last words to him concerned the need to institutionalize and internationalize the nonviolent movement. Lafayette made this his life’s mission.
After King’s death, Lafayette returned to American Baptist to complete his bachelor’s degree and then earned his master’s and doctorate from Harvard University. Lafayette later served as Director of Peace and Justice in Latin America. President of the Consortium for Peace Research, Education and Development; Director of the Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies at the University of Rhode Island; Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta; and minister of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Tuskegee, Alabama, among other positions.
“Bernard has worked in Latin America with violent groups there. He did nonviolence workshops in South Africa with the African National Congress. He went to Nigeria when the civil war was going on there,” Young said. “Bernard went literally everywhere he was invited as a global prophet of nonviolence.”
“Lafayette’s legacy lives on in the thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people he helped in America and abroad,” DeMark Liggins, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said Thursday.
In his memoirs, Lafayette wrote that the constant threat of death during those early years of the organization taught him that the value of life “lies not in longevity, but in what people do to give it significance.”