Bernard LaFayette, the organizer whose behind-the-scenes work building voter-registration efforts in Selma, Alabama, helped create the conditions that led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, has died. He was 85. His son, Bernard LaFayette III, said his father died Thursday morning of a heart attack.
LaFayette had long been a key but often quiet figure in the civil rights movement. He was part of a group of Nashville students who helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1960, which coordinated desegregation and voting-rights campaigns across the South. Although SNCC initially decided Selma was too dangerous, LaFayette insisted on trying. In 1963 he became director of the Alabama Voter Registration Campaign and moved to Selma with his then-wife Colia Liddell. There he worked to develop local leadership and build momentum for change, an effort he described in his 2013 memoir, In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma.
Two years later, on March 7, 1965, images from Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge of marchers — including future congressman John Lewis — being beaten by state troopers shocked the nation and helped prompt Congress to act. LaFayette had done much of the preparatory organizing that made the national outcry and subsequent legislative push possible. He missed the initial march, known as “Bloody Sunday,” because he was in Chicago on another project, but he soon helped mobilize people and resources to join the follow-up march that culminated in a successful march to Montgomery after President Lyndon Johnson introduced the Voting Rights Act.
LaFayette’s activism carried significant personal risk. He survived a near-assassination on the same night civil rights leader Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi; the FBI later said the attack was part of a conspiracy targeting civil rights workers. LaFayette was beaten outside his home, then faced a gunman. A neighbor with a rifle intervened; LaFayette later recalled standing between them and pleading that the neighbor not shoot. He wrote that in that moment he felt an “extraordinary sense of internal strength instead of fear.” He saw nonviolence as a moral and strategic struggle aimed at winning over opponents rather than defeating them.
Raised in Tampa, Florida, LaFayette traced his commitment to justice to an incident from childhood when his grandmother fell trying to board a segregated trolley. She had insisted he attend The American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, where he roomed with John Lewis and both helped lead Nashville’s nonviolent campaign that contributed to desegregating downtown businesses. President Barack Obama later spoke of the courage of LaFayette and Lewis in a eulogy for Lewis, recalling how the two sat up front on an integrated Greyhound bus ride home and endured harrowing conditions to challenge segregation.
LaFayette left college during his final exams in 1961 to join the Freedom Rides and was beaten in Montgomery and arrested in Jackson, Mississippi; he was among more than 300 Freedom Riders who were sent to Parchman Prison. He later trained young leaders in the Chicago Freedom Movement, helped organize tenant unions, and pushed for public-health responses when lead poisoning afflicted children of workers he knew; his efforts contributed to early mass screening for lead exposure.
Working with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and leaders such as Andrew Young, LaFayette helped prepare for Martin Luther King Jr.’s Northern campaigns, confronting violent opposition and difficult urban issues. By 1968 he was the national coordinator of King’s Poor People’s Campaign and was with King at the Lorraine Motel the morning of King’s assassination; King’s final admonition to LaFayette was about institutionalizing and internationalizing the nonviolence movement, a mission LaFayette carried forward.
After King’s death LaFayette returned to complete his bachelor’s degree at American Baptist College and went on to earn a master’s and doctorate from Harvard. His later roles included 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 Emory University’s Candler School of Theology; and minister of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Tuskegee, Alabama. He also ran nonviolence workshops internationally, including in South Africa with the African National Congress and in Nigeria during civil war-era turmoil.
Colleagues remembered LaFayette as someone who often worked out of the spotlight. Mary Lou Finley, who worked with him in Chicago and later on nonviolence training, said he preferred quiet organizing and believed he could do more that way. Andrew Young recalled that LaFayette traveled widely as a “global prophet of nonviolence,” answering invitations to teach and counsel around the world.
In his memoir LaFayette reflected on the omnipresent threat to his life during the early years of activism and concluded that the worth of life “lies not in longevity, but in what people do to give it significance.”