Civil Rights Strategist Bernard LaFayette Dies at 85 in Nashville

Civil Rights Organizer Dies in Nashville at 85

Bernard LaFayette, a civil rights organizer who played a key role in the voter registration campaign in Selma, Alabama, died Thursday morning in Nashville, Tennessee, at the age of 85.

His son, Bernard LaFayette III, said his father died of a heart attack.

Early Role in Selma Voting Rights Efforts

LaFayette served as the advance organizer for the voter registration campaign in Selma, Alabama, that contributed to events culminating in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He moved to Selma after being named director of the Alabama Voter Registration Campaign in 1963.

In Selma, LaFayette worked with his former wife, Colia Liddell, to develop local leadership and build momentum for change. He described this work in his 2013 memoir, “In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma.”

Involvement in Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee

LaFayette was part of a delegation of students from Nashville who in 1960 helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which organized desegregation and voting rights campaigns in the southern United States.

Assassination Attempt and Freedom Rides

During his work in Alabama, LaFayette survived an assassination attempt on the same night Medgar Evers was killed in Mississippi. He was beaten outside his home, and his attacker pointed a gun at him. A neighbor arrived with a rifle, and LaFayette stood between the two men while asking the neighbor not to shoot. He later acknowledged that the neighbor’s gun may have saved his life.

In 1961, LaFayette left college during final exams to join an official Freedom Ride aimed at enforcing a Supreme Court ruling against segregation in interstate travel. He was beaten in Montgomery, Alabama, and arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, becoming one of more than 300 Freedom Riders sent to Parchman Prison.

Connections with John Lewis and Barack Obama’s Remarks

LaFayette grew up in Tampa, Florida, and later attended American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, where he roomed with John Lewis. The two helped lead a nonviolent campaign that resulted in Nashville becoming the first major Southern city to desegregate its downtown accommodations.

President Barack Obama, in a 2020 eulogy for Lewis, recalled that Lewis and LaFayette sat at the front of a Greyhound bus while traveling home for Christmas break in 1960, after a Supreme Court decision banning segregation in interstate travel. Obama said the driver became angry and repeatedly left the bus at stops during the night.

Chicago Freedom Movement and Lead Screening Efforts

After his work in Selma, LaFayette worked with youth in the Chicago Freedom Movement and helped organize tenant unions. Mary Lou Finley, a professor emeritus at Antioch University Seattle who worked with him in Chicago in the 1960s, said that tenant protections in place today are a direct outcome of that work.

Finley also said that when LaFayette learned two children of one of his secretaries were sickened by lead, he organized high school students to collect urine samples from toddlers to screen for lead poisoning and pushed Chicago officials to help develop what she described as the nation’s first mass screening program for lead poisoning.

Work with Martin Luther King Jr. and International Nonviolence

LaFayette later worked with Andrew Young and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in preparation for Martin Luther King Jr.’s campaign in Chicago. By 1968, he was national coordinator of King’s Poor People’s Campaign and was with King at the Lorraine Motel on the morning King was assassinated. According to descriptions of King’s last conversation with him, King spoke about the need to institutionalize and internationalize the nonviolence movement, a goal LaFayette pursued thereafter.

After King’s death, LaFayette completed his bachelor’s degree at American Baptist and went on to earn a master’s degree and a doctorate from Harvard University. He later served 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 in Atlanta; and minister of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Tuskegee, Alabama.

Andrew Young stated in a 2021 interview that LaFayette conducted nonviolence workshops in South Africa with the African National Congress, worked with violent groups in Latin America, and traveled to Nigeria during its civil war.

Legacy and Reflections on His Life’s Work

DeMark Liggins, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said LaFayette’s legacy is reflected in the thousands, and possibly hundreds of thousands, of people he assisted in the United States and abroad.

In his memoir, LaFayette wrote that the constant threat of death during his early organizing years led him to conclude that the value of life lies not in its length but in what people do to give it significance.