**Bernard LaFayette, Civil Rights Pioneer and Architect of the Selma Voter Registration Campaign, Dies at 85**
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — 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, his son, said his father died Thursday morning of a heart attack. He was 85.
On March 7, 1965, the brutal 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 part of a delegation of Nashville students who, in 1960, helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The organization spearheaded desegregation and voting rights campaigns across the South. Initially, SNCC crossed Selma off its map after scouting trips determined “the white folks were too mean and the Black folks were too scared,” LaFayette recalled. However, he insisted on trying anyway.
Named director of the Alabama Voter Registration Campaign in 1963, LaFayette moved to Selma and, with his former wife Colia Liddell, gradually built the leadership capacity of local people. He convinced them that change was possible and created unstoppable momentum. He described this work in his 2013 memoir, *In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma.*
LaFayette faced many dangers, including an assassination attempt on the same night Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi—a conspiracy, the FBI said, aimed at killing civil rights workers. LaFayette was beaten outside his home before his assailant 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.
At that moment, LaFayette said he felt “an extraordinary sense of internal strength instead of fear.” Rather than fight back, he looked his attacker in the eyes. Nonviolence, he wrote, is a fight “to win that person over, a struggle of the human spirit.” Nonetheless, he acknowledged that the neighbor’s gun might have saved his life.
By the time his work in Selma bore fruit in 1965, LaFayette had already begun a new project in Chicago. He had planned to join the Selma-to-Montgomery march on its second day and thus missed Bloody Sunday, when the march was stopped by tear gas and club-wielding state troopers before leaving Selma.
“I felt helpless at a distance,” he wrote. “I was stricken with grief, concerned that so many people in my beloved community were hurt, possibly killed.” However, he quickly shifted gears, rounding up people in Chicago and arranging transportation 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 a childhood incident deeply impacted him. At seven years old, while trying to board a trolley with his grandmother, he witnessed segregation firsthand: Black passengers had to pay at the front and then walk to the back to board. On this occasion, the conductor began to pull away before they could get on, causing his grandmother to fall. Unable to help because of his size, LaFayette recalled feeling “like a sword cut me in half,” vowing to address such problems someday.
His grandmother also shaped his future by deciding 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 John Lewis. Together, they helped lead the nonviolent civil disobedience campaign that made Nashville the first major Southern city to desegregate its downtown accommodations.
President Barack Obama spoke about the roommates in a eulogy after Lewis died in 2020, recalling how they integrated a Greyhound bus while traveling home for Christmas break—Lewis to Troy, Alabama, and LaFayette to Tampa, Florida—just weeks after the Supreme Court banned segregation in interstate travel in 1960. The two sat up front and refused to move, angering the driver, who stormed off at every stop throughout the night.
“Imagine the courage of these two people—to challenge an entire infrastructure of oppression,” Obama said. “Nobody was there to protect them. There were no camera crews to record events.”
LaFayette has said they didn’t fully realize the impact of their work at the time. “We lived through this, but this was our daily lives,” he told The Associated Press in a 2021 interview. “We weren’t trying to make history or trying to rewrite history. We were responding to the problems of the particular time.”
In 1961, LaFayette dropped out of college in the middle of final exams to join an official Freedom Ride—one of many attempting to force Southern authorities to comply with the Supreme 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.
Later, LaFayette trained Black youth as 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, professor emeritus at Antioch University Seattle, who worked with LaFayette in the 1960s.
When he learned that one of his secretaries had two children sickened by lead—a huge problem not well understood at the time—LaFayette organized high school students to screen toddlers for lead poisoning by collecting urine samples. He also pressed Chicago to develop the nation’s first mass screening for lead poisoning, Finley noted.
“Bernard has always worked quietly behind the scenes,” said Finley, who later collaborated with him on nonviolence training. “He avoided the spotlight. In some ways, I think he felt he could do more if he was working quietly.”
LaFayette also worked alongside Andrew Young and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) to prepare for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s ill-fated Northern campaign. Though several of King’s Chicago marches were attacked by white mobs, LaFayette and Young challenged the notion that the movement was a failure.
Young noted in a 2021 interview that Chicago was more complex to organize—a population 20 times larger than Birmingham’s—while addressing a range of difficult issues from neighborhood integration to schools and jobs. “In each one of those, we made progress,” Young said.
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 emphasized the need to institutionalize and internationalize the nonviolence movement—a mission LaFayette made his life’s work.
After King’s death, LaFayette returned to American Baptist to complete his bachelor’s degree and later earned a master’s and doctorate from Harvard University. He served in numerous roles over the years, including:
– Director of Peace and Justice in Latin America
– Chairperson 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, Emory University
– Minister of the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Tuskegee, Alabama
“Bernard did work in Latin America with violent groups there. He conducted nonviolence workshops in South Africa with the African National Congress and went to Nigeria during its civil war,” Young said. “Bernard literally went everywhere he was invited as a global prophet of nonviolence.”
DeMark Liggins, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said Thursday that LaFayette’s “legacy lives on in the thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of people he helped both in America and abroad.”
In his memoir, LaFayette wrote that the ever-present threat of death during those early years taught him that the value of life “lies not in longevity, but in what people do to give it significance.”
Bernard LaFayette’s quiet courage, lifelong commitment to nonviolence, and unyielding dedication to justice have left an indelible mark on the civil rights movement and beyond. He will be remembered as a profound force for change, whose work continues to inspire generations.
https://abcnews.com/US/wireStory/bernard-lafayette-selma-voting-rights-organizer-dies-85-130806295
