Bernard LaFayette, advance man for Selma voting rights campaign, dies at 85

Bernard LaFayette, the civil rights organizer who did the groundwork for the 1965 Selma, Alabama, voter registration campaign more than two years before the marches that shocked the nation, died Thursday of a heart attack, his son said. He was 85.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. — Bernard LaFayette, the civil rights organizer who did the advance work for the voter registration campaign in Selma, Alabama, that led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, died Thursday of a heart attack, his son said. He was 85.

Bernard LaFayette III confirmed his father’s death Thursday morning.

LaFayette moved to Selma in 1963 as director of the Alabama Voter Registration Campaign, building the local leadership capacity that made the campaign possible at a time when others had written the city off as too dangerous to organize. The organizational infrastructure he built helped create the momentum for a campaign whose culminating marches led Congress to pass the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had crossed Selma off its map after an initial assessment concluded, as LaFayette later recalled, that “the white folks were too mean and the Black folks were too scared.” He insisted on going anyway. Working alongside his former wife Colia Liddell, LaFayette spent two years convincing residents that change was possible before the campaign drew national attention.

He described that work in a 2013 memoir, “In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma.”

Missed Bloody Sunday, helped organize the march that followed

LaFayette was already working on a new project in Chicago by the time the marches he had prepared for took place. On March 7, 1965 — two years after his arrival in Selma — state troopers stopped a march at the Edmund Pettus Bridge with tear gas and clubs, images that led the evening news. LaFayette missed it.

“I felt helpless at a distance,” he wrote in his memoir. “I was stricken with grief, concerned that so many people in my beloved community were hurt, possibly killed.”

He moved quickly. He gathered people in Chicago and arranged transportation to Alabama for a second attempt. They set off two weeks later after President Lyndon Johnson had introduced the Voting Rights Act to Congress.

With King at the Lorraine Motel

By 1968, LaFayette was the national coordinator of King’s Poor People’s Campaign. He was with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on the morning of King’s assassination. King’s last words to him were about the need to institutionalize and internationalize the nonviolence movement. LaFayette spent the remainder of his life in pursuit of that mission.

Andrew Young, who worked alongside LaFayette in the Chicago Freedom Movement, described the scope of that work in a 2021 interview with the Associated Press. “Bernard did work in Latin America. He did nonviolence workshops in South Africa with the African National Congress. He went to Nigeria when the civil war was happening there,” Young said. “Bernard literally went everywhere he was invited as sort of a global prophet of nonviolence.”

Assassination attempt and the Freedom Rides

LaFayette survived an assassination attempt on the same night in 1963 that Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi, in what the FBI said was a conspiracy to kill civil rights workers. He was beaten outside his home before his attacker pointed a gun at him. A neighbor appeared with a rifle, and LaFayette found himself standing between the two men.

He said he felt “an extraordinary sense of internal strength instead of fear” in that moment. Nonviolence, he wrote, is a fight “to win that person over, a struggle of the human spirit.” He also acknowledged that his neighbor’s gun may have saved his life.

LaFayette had previously been beaten in Montgomery, Alabama, during the Freedom Rides of 1961. He was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, and became one of more than 300 Freedom Riders sent to Parchman Prison after the rides sought to force Southern authorities to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling banning segregation in interstate travel.

Nashville, SNCC, and a Greyhound bus

LaFayette was among the Nashville students who helped found SNCC in 1960. At Nashville’s American Baptist Theological Seminary — now American Baptist College — he roomed with future congressman John Lewis. The two helped lead the nonviolent campaign that resulted in Nashville becoming the first major Southern city to desegregate its downtown accommodations.

LaFayette and Lewis also integrated a Greyhound bus while traveling home for Christmas break weeks after the Supreme Court’s 1960 ruling, sitting up front and refusing to move at each stop through the night.

In a eulogy after Lewis died in 2020, former President Barack Obama recalled the episode. “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 told the Associated Press in a 2021 interview that he and his peers were not thinking in historical terms as they did the work. “We lived through this, but this was our daily lives,” he said. “When you think about it, we weren’t trying to make history or trying to rewrite history. We were responding to the problems of the particular time.”

Chicago work and later career

LaFayette also trained young people in Chicago as leaders in the Chicago Freedom Movement and helped organize tenant unions there. After King’s death, he returned to American Baptist to complete his undergraduate degree, then earned a master’s degree and doctorate from Harvard University.

He went on to serve in multiple academic and advocacy roles, including as director of the Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies at the University of Rhode Island and as distinguished senior scholar-in-residence at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta.

Mary Lou Finley, a professor emeritus at Antioch University Seattle who worked with LaFayette in Chicago in the 1960s and later collaborated with him on nonviolence training, described his consistent approach. “Bernard has always worked quietly behind the scenes,” Finley said. “He has avoided the spotlight. In some ways, I think he felt like he could do more if he were doing it quietly.”

In his Selma memoir, LaFayette wrote that living under the constant threat of death during those years of organizing had taught him that the value of life “lies not in longevity, but in what people do to give it significance.”