NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Bernard LaFayette, the advance organizer whose groundwork in Selma, Alabama, helped set the stage for the 1965 voting rights movement and the eventual passage of the Voting Rights Act, has died. His son, Bernard LaFayette III, said his father died Thursday morning of a heart attack. He was 85.
LaFayette’s behind-the-scenes preparation and leadership made possible the national outrage that followed the March 7, 1965, beatings on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge — the event known as “Bloody Sunday” that galvanized Congress to act. Yet two years earlier, LaFayette had quietly moved into Selma to build a local movement after he and other Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee members had first written the town off as too dangerous and its residents too fearful to engage.
A Nashville student leader, LaFayette was among those who helped found SNCC in 1960 and who organized desegregation and voting-rights campaigns across the South. In 1963, named director of the Alabama Voter Registration Campaign, he and his then-wife, Colia Liddell, worked to develop local leadership, convincing Black residents that change was possible and creating a momentum that became unstoppable. He recounted this work in his 2013 memoir, In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma.
LaFayette faced frequent danger. The FBI later cited a conspiracy to kill civil rights workers that included an assassination attempt on him on the night Medgar Evers was murdered. He was beaten outside his home and confronted with a gun; a neighbor emerged with a rifle after LaFayette’s calls for help. Standing between the two men, LaFayette urged his neighbor not to shoot and recalled feeling “an extraordinary sense of internal strength instead of fear.” He described nonviolence as a struggle to win over an opponent — “a struggle of the human spirit.”
By the time Selma reached national attention in 1965, LaFayette had moved on to work in Chicago. He had planned to join the Selma-to-Montgomery march on its second day and so missed Bloody Sunday; he later organized people in Chicago and arranged transportation for them to join a subsequent, victorious march after President Lyndon Johnson had introduced the Voting Rights Act to Congress. “I felt helpless at a distance,” he wrote of the violence on the bridge. “I was stricken with grief, concerned that so many people in my beloved community were hurt, possibly killed.”
LaFayette’s activism was rooted in childhood experiences in Tampa, Florida. At age 7 he watched his grandmother fall when a segregated trolley left before she could board; the feeling of helplessness left him determined to act against injustice. His grandmother also arranged for him to attend Nashville’s American Baptist Theological Seminary (now American Baptist College), where he roomed with future congressman John Lewis. The pair helped lead the nonviolent campaign that made Nashville the first major Southern city to desegregate downtown businesses. President Barack Obama later recalled the courage of the two roommates in a eulogy for Lewis, noting they once sat up front on an integrated Greyhound bus ride home and were met with hostility.
In 1961, LaFayette left college during finals to join an official Freedom Ride. He was beaten in Montgomery and arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, becoming one of more than 300 Freedom Riders sent to Parchman Prison. He later trained Black youth as leaders in the Chicago Freedom Movement, helped organize tenant unions and pushed for public health responses to lead poisoning after learning a secretary’s children were sickened. Mary Lou Finley, who worked with LaFayette in Chicago, said that the tenant protections in place today are direct outcomes of that organizing and that LaFayette helped spur the nation’s first mass screening for lead poisoning.
LaFayette worked with Andrew Young and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on King’s northern campaigns; while some marches there were met by violence, he and Young argued the Chicago movement made important progress on complex issues of housing, schooling and jobs in a much larger, more difficult environment than southern campaigns. Young said LaFayette “literally went everywhere he was invited as sort of a global prophet of nonviolence,” noting LaFayette’s 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. King’s last words to him, LaFayette recalled, concerned the need to institutionalize and internationalize the nonviolence movement — a mission LaFayette pursued for the rest of his life.
After King’s death, LaFayette returned to American Baptist to finish his bachelor’s degree and later earned a master’s and doctorate from Harvard. His career included roles as 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 the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Tuskegee, Alabama, among other posts.
Colleagues remember him as modest and often working out of the spotlight. Finley said LaFayette “has always worked quietly behind the scenes” and sometimes believed he could do more that way. Reflecting on the constant risk of death during the movement’s early years, LaFayette wrote in his memoir that the value of life “lies not in longevity, but in what people do to give it significance.”
