Bernard LaFayette, a key behind-the-scenes organizer whose grassroots work in Selma helped spark the 1965 voting rights movement, died Thursday morning of a heart attack, his son Bernard LaFayette III said. He was 85.
A founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a longtime civil rights strategist, LaFayette quietly built local leadership in Selma after earlier organizers had written the town off as too dangerous. Named director of the Alabama Voter Registration Campaign in 1963, he and his then-wife, Colia Liddell, moved into Selma to recruit and train residents, lay the groundwork for demonstrations, and create the momentum that culminated in the national outrage over the March 7, 1965, beatings on the Edmund Pettus Bridge — the Bloody Sunday attack that helped push Congress to act on voting rights.
LaFayette’s organizing often put him in harm’s way. The FBI later cited a conspiracy to kill civil rights workers that included an assassination attempt on him the night Medgar Evers was murdered. He was beaten outside his home and once confronted with a gun; when a neighbor came out with a rifle after LaFayette called for help, LaFayette interposed himself and urged restraint, later describing a surprising sense of internal strength rather than fear. He framed nonviolence as a moral and strategic struggle to win over opponents.
By the time Selma drew nationwide attention in 1965, LaFayette had moved to Chicago. He had planned to join the Selma-to-Montgomery march on its second day and missed Bloody Sunday, later organizing people in Chicago and arranging transportation so they could take part in the victorious march that followed President Lyndon Johnson’s appeal to Congress for a voting rights bill. He wrote of feeling “helpless at a distance” when he learned of the bridge violence, grieving for those hurt in his community.
LaFayette’s commitment to activism had deep roots. As a child in Tampa, Florida, he watched his grandmother fall when a segregated trolley left before she could board; the experience of helplessness shaped his determination to act. His grandmother also arranged for him to attend Nashville’s American Baptist Theological Seminary (now American Baptist College), where he roomed with John Lewis. The pair were central to Nashville’s nonviolent sit-ins and the campaign that made the city the first major Southern downtown to desegregate.
In 1961 LaFayette left college during finals to join a Freedom Ride. He was beaten in Montgomery, jailed in Jackson, Mississippi, and became one of more than 300 Freedom Riders sent to Parchman Prison. He later trained young leaders for the Chicago Freedom Movement, helped organize tenant unions, and pushed for public-health responses to lead poisoning after learning a colleague’s children were ill. Colleagues credit his organizing with helping spur tenant protections and the nation’s first mass lead-poisoning screening.
LaFayette worked with Andrew Young and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on northern campaigns, arguing that those efforts advanced complex issues — housing, schooling and jobs — in a larger, tougher environment than many southern campaigns. Young later said LaFayette “literally went everywhere he was invited as sort of a global prophet of nonviolence,” noting work in Latin America, South Africa with the African National Congress, and Nigeria during its civil war.
By 1968 LaFayette was national coordinator of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign and was with King at the Lorraine Motel the morning King was assassinated. LaFayette recalled King’s last admonition to institutionalize and internationalize the nonviolence movement — a mission he pursued for the rest of his life.
After King’s death, LaFayette returned to finish his bachelor’s degree at American Baptist, then earned a master’s and doctorate from Harvard. His career included roles as director of Peace and Justice in Latin America; 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 Emory University’s Candler School of Theology; and minister of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Tuskegee, Alabama.
Colleagues remember LaFayette as modest and often working out of the spotlight. Mary Lou Finley, who worked with him in Chicago, said he preferred to work quietly behind the scenes. In his memoir, In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma, LaFayette reflected on the constant danger of the movement’s early years and wrote that life’s value lies not in longevity but in what people do to give it significance.
His death closes a lifetime of organizing that shaped local movements, national policy and international nonviolence work. Those who knew him recall a steady, principled organizer who sought durable change through training, local leadership and the moral force of nonviolent action.