American civil rights activist Bernard Lafayette in 2020.

Bernard Lafayette (or LaFayette), Jr. (born July 29, 1940) is an American civil rights activist and organizer, who was a leader in the Civil Rights Movement. He played a leading role in early organizing of the Selma Voting Rights Movement; was a member of the Nashville Student Movement; and worked closely throughout the 1960s movements with groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the American Friends Service Committee.

Contents

• 1 Early life
• 2 Early adult life and career
• 3 Freedom Rides
• 4 Selma
• 5 Life after Selma
• 6 See also
• 7 Sources
• 8 External links

Early life

Lafayette was born and raised in Tampa, Florida. His parents were Bernard Lafayette, Sr., and Verdell Lafayette. Bernard was the eldest of eight children. His siblings were Harold Rozelia, Brenda, Geri, Michael, and Victoria. Lafayette spent much of his childhood in Tampa. His family grew up poor, so Bernard started working odd jobs to gain more income by the age of 11. His jobs included cashiering, meat cutting, delivering produce, and collecting change at a coffee shop. When reminiscing on his childhood, Bernard says: "I had to grow up rapidly. In other words, I didn't have a childhood." Despite being black in the south, Bernard says he went to school in an integrated Elementary School, and eventually began to go to schools that were still segregated. While he was at the integrated school he says that "even though it wasn't segregated, I could still see the contrast between the two worlds." Bernard has clear recollections of some of the racism that he experienced at a young age. When Bernard was seven years old, he was heading downtown with his grandmother, Ma Foster, so they decided to catch a cable car. One of the segregation laws regarding cable cars was that black people would pay at the front door, and then enter through the back door. When His grandmother paid the cable car driver, the driver started driving before either of them could board, pocketing their money and leaving them stranded. He says this is one of the first instances where he realized he wanted to do something about how his people were being treated.

Early adult life and career

Bernard was married to Kate Bulls Lafayette in 1969. He had two children with his previous wife Colia Liddell Lafayette, Bernard Lafayette, III and James Lafayette, Sr. According to his children, Bernard was a loving father, who never yelled at, was stern with, or even expressed anger towards his wife or his kids. The family had a very tight-knit relationship, and spent tons of time together. James became an ordained preacher (influenced by his father, who was a religious man), and Lafayette III attended American Baptist College.

As a young man at the age of twenty, Lafayette moved to Nashville, Tennessee, and enrolled in the American Baptist Theological Seminary. During the course of his freshman year, he took cl*es in nonviolence at the Highlander Folk School run by Myles Horton, and attended many meetings promoting nonviolence. He learned more about the philosophy of nonviolence as lived by Mohandas Gandhi, while taking seminars from activist James Lawson, a well-known nonviolent representative of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

Lafayette began to use the nonviolent techniques as he became more exposed to the strong racial injustice of the South. In 1959, he, along with his friends Diane Nash, James Bevel, and John Lewis, all members of the Nashville Student Movement, led sit-ins, such as the 1960 Lunch Counter Sit-In, at restaurants and businesses that practiced segregation. As an advocate of nonviolence, in 1960 Lafayette *isted in the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Freedom Rides

In 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) initiated a movement to enforce federal integration laws on interstate bus routes. This movement, known as the Freedom Rides, had African American and white volunteers ride together on bus routes through the segregated South. Lafayette wanted to participate, but his parents forbade him. After the Freedom Riders were violently attacked in the city of Anniston, Alabama, the Nashville Student Movement, of which Lafayette was a member, vowed to take over the journey. At the time, some civil rights leaders worried that the Freedom Rides were too provocative and would damage the movement. Despite many doubts, these Nashville students were determined to finish the job.

In May 1961, in the city of Montgomery, Alabama, Lafayette and the other riders were "greeted" at the bus terminal by an angry white mob, members of Ku Klux Klan chapters, and were viciously attacked. The Freedom Riders were brutally beaten. Their attackers carried every makeshift weapon imaginable: baseball bats, wooden boards, bricks, chains, tire irons, pipes, and even garden tools.

During the Montgomery attack, Lafayette stood firm; his fellow riders William Barbee and John Lewis were beaten until they fell unconscious. Lafayette, Fred Leonard and Allen Cason narrowly escaped being killed by jumping over a wall and running to the post office. Everyone inside was carrying on individual business, just like nothing was happening outside. Lafayette later stated, " I thought they were shooting Freedom Riders." It was the gunshot of Alabama's Director of Public Safety, Floyd Mann, who was fighting for the protection of the Freedom Riders.

Lafayette with other Riders was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, and jailed at Parchman State Prison Farm during June 1961. During Lafayette's participation in civil rights activities, he was beaten and arrested 27 times.

Selma

In the summer of 1962, Lafayette accepted a position with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to do organizing work in Selma, Alabama alongside his then wife Colia Liddell Lafayette.Upon arriving in the city in February 1963, he began leading meetings at which he spoke about the condition of African Americans in the South and encouraged local African Americans to share their experiences. He met the representatives of the Dallas County Voters League who impressed him. On the night of June 12, 1963 (the same night that Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi), Lafayette was severely beaten by a white *ailant. While badly injured, he was not deterred from continuing his work. In late 1964, the board of Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) decided to join the ongoing Alabama Project organized by James Bevel, Diane Nash, and James Orange, and chose Selma as the focal point to gain voting rights for African Americans. In early 1965, Lafayette, Bevel, Martin Luther King Jr., Orange, Nash and others organized a series of public demonstrations that finally, with the march from Selma-to-Montgomery initiated by Bevel, put enough pressure on the federal government to take action and gave enough support to President Lyndon Johnson for Johnson to demand the drafting and p*age of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Life after Selma

Lafayette went on to work on the 1966 Chicago Open Housing Movement (he had worked in Chicago earlier with Kale Williams, Bill Moyer, David Jehnsen and other leaders of the American Friends Service Committee). He later became ordained as a Baptist minister and served as president of the American Baptist Theological Seminary.

In 1973, Lafayette was named first director of the Peace Education Program at Gustavus Adolphus College, Saint Peter, Minnesota. The Gustavus program enabled Lafayette to infuse the entire curriculum of the college with peace education. Lafayette served this Lutheran liberal arts college for nearly three years.

Lafayette has been recognized as a major authority on strategies for nonviolent social change. He is also recognized as one of the leading exponents of nonviolent direct action in the world.

He was a Senior Fellow at the University of Rhode Island, where he helped to found the Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies. The Center promotes nonviolence education using a curriculum based on the principles and methods of Martin Luther King Jr. He is a Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at the Candler School of Theology, at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He currently serves as scholar-in-residence at the Caroline Marshall Draughon Center for the Arts & Humanities in the College of Liberal Arts at Auburn University.

Lafayette was honored as a Doctor of Humane Letters from Mount Holyoke College, in May 2012.In 2014, The University of Rhode Island honored LaFayette with an honorary doctorate in recognition of his lifetime nonviolence leadership for civil and human rights. In 2019 he was awarded the Coretta Scott King Legacy Award by Antioch College's Coretta Scott King Center for Cultural and Intellectual Freedom.

Following Selma, Bernard went on to write several books about his experiences in the civil rights movement and books covering his views and thoughts on nonviolence. These books include The Leaders Manual: A Structured Guide and Introduction to Kingian Nonviolence, The Briefing Booklet: An Orientation to the Kingian Nonviolence Conflict Reconciliation Program, and In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma. His oral history is included in the 2006 book Generation on Fire: Voices of Protest from the 1960s by Jeff Kisseloff.

See also

• List of civil rights leaders
• List of peace activists

Sources

External links

• Bernard LaFayette Jr. and Kathryn Lee Johnson. In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma. Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2016.
• Appearances on C-SPAN
• SNCC Digital Gateway: Bernard Lafayette, Do*entary website created by the SNCC Legacy Project and Duke University, telling the story of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and gr*roots organizing from the inside-out

Activist
groups

• Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights
• Atlanta Student Movement
• Black Panther Party
• Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters
• Congress of Racial Equality (CORE)
• Committee for Freedom Now
• Committee on Appeal for Human Rights
• Council for United Civil Rights Leadership
• Council of Federated Organizations
• Dallas County Voters League
• Deacons for Defense and Justice
• Georgia Council on Human Relations
• Highlander Folk School
• Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights
• Lowndes County Freedom Organization
• Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party
• Montgomery Improvement *ociation
• NAACP
  • Youth Council
• Nashville Student Movement
• Nation of Islam
• Northern Student Movement
• National Council of Negro Women
• National Urban League
• Operation Breadbasket
• Regional Council of Negro Leadership
• Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC)
• Southern Regional Council
• Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)
• The Freedom Singers
• United Auto Workers (UAW)
• Wednesdays in Mississippi
• Women's Political Council

Activists

• Ralph Abernathy
• Victoria Gray Adams
• Zev Aelony
• Mathew Ahmann
• Muhammad Ali
• William G. Anderson
• Gwendolyn Armstrong
• Arnold Aronson
• Ella Baker
• James Baldwin
• Marion Barry
• Daisy Bates
• Harry Belafonte
• James Bevel
• Claude Black
• Gloria Blackwell
• Randolph Blackwell
• Unita Blackwell
• Ezell Blair Jr.
• Joanne Bland
• Julian Bond
• Joseph E. Boone
• William Holmes Borders
• Amelia Boynton
• Bruce Boynton
• Raylawni Branch
• Stanley Branche
• Ruby Bridges
• Aurelia Browder
• H. Rap Brown
• Ralph Bunche
• Guy Carawan
• Stokely Carmichael
• Johnnie Carr
• James Chaney
• J. L. Chestnut
• Shirley Chisholm
• Colia Lafayette Clark
• Ramsey Clark
• Septima Clark
• Xernona Clayton
• Eldridge Cleaver
• Kathleen Cleaver
• Charles E. Cobb Jr.
• Annie Lee Cooper
• Dorothy Cotton
• Claudette Colvin
• Vernon Dahmer
• Jonathan Daniels
• Angela Davis
• Joseph DeLaine
• Dave Dennis
• Annie Devine
• Patricia Stephens Due
• Joseph Ellwanger
• Charles Evers
• Medgar Evers
• Myrlie Evers-Williams
• Chuck *er
• James Farmer
• Walter Fauntroy
• James Forman
• Marie Foster
• Golden Frinks
• Andrew Goodman
• Robert Graetz
• Fred Gray
• Jack Greenberg
• Dick Gregory
• Lawrence Guyot
• Prathia Hall
• Fannie Lou Hamer
• Fred Hampton
• William E. Harbour
• Vincent Harding
• Dorothy Height
• Lola Hendricks
• Aaron Henry
• Oliver Hill
• Donald L. Hollowell
• James Hood
• Myles Horton
• Zilphia Horton
• T. R. M. Howard
• Ruby Hurley
• Jesse Jackson
• Jimmie Lee Jackson
• Richie Jean Jackson
• T. J. Jemison
• Esau Jenkins
• Barbara Rose Johns
• Vernon Johns
• Frank Minis Johnson
• Clarence Jones
• J. Charles Jones
• Matthew Jones
• Vernon Jordan
• Tom Kahn
• Clyde Kennard
• A. D. King
• C.B. King
• Coretta Scott King
• Martin Luther King Jr.
• Martin Luther King Sr.
• Bernard Lafayette
• James Lawson
• Bernard Lee
• Sanford R. Leigh
• Jim Letherer
• Stanley Levison
• John Lewis
• Viola Liuzzo
• Z. Alexander Looby
• Joseph Lowery
• Clara Luper
• Danny Lyon
• Malcolm X
• Mae Mallory
• Vivian Malone
• Bob Mants
• Thurgood Marshall
• Benjamin Mays
• Franklin McCain
• Charles McDew
• Ralph McGill
• Floyd McKissick
• Joseph McNeil
• James Meredith
• William Ming
• Jack Minnis
• Amzie Moore
• Cecil B. Moore
• Douglas E. Moore
• Harriette Moore
• Harry T. Moore
• Queen Mother Moore
• William Lewis Moore
• Irene Morgan
• Bob Moses
• William Moyer
• Elijah Muhammad
• Diane Nash
• Charles Neblett
• Huey P. Newton
• Edgar Nixon
• Jack O'Dell
• James Orange
• Rosa Parks
• James Peck
• Charles Person
• Homer Plessy
• Adam Clayton Powell Jr.
• Fay Bellamy Powell
• Rodney N. Powell
• Al Raby
• Lincoln Ragsdale
• A. Philip Randolph
• George Raymond
• George Raymond Jr.
• Bernice Johnson Reagon
• Cordell Reagon
• James Reeb
• Frederick D. Reese
• Walter Reuther
• Gloria Richardson
• David Richmond
• Bernice Robinson
• Jo Ann Robinson
• Angela Russell
• Bayard Rustin
• Bernie Sanders
• Michael Schwerner
• Bobby Seale
• Cleveland Sellers
• Charles Sherrod
• Alexander D. Shimkin
• Fred Shuttlesworth
• Modjeska Monteith Simkins
• Glenn E. Smiley
• A. Maceo Smith
• Kelly Miller Smith
• Mary Louise Smith
• Maxine Smith
• Ruby Doris Smith-Robinson
• Charles Kenzie Steele
• Hank Thomas
• Dorothy Tillman
• A. P. Tureaud
• Hartman Turnbow
• Albert Turner
• C. T. Vivian
• Wyatt Tee Walker
• Hollis Watkins
• Walter Francis White
• Roy Wilkins
• Hosea Williams
• Kale Williams
• Robert F. Williams
• Andrew Young
• Whitney Young
• Sammy Younge Jr.
• Bob Zellner
• James Zwerg

Influences

• Nonviolence
  • Padayatra
• Sermon on the Mount
• Mahatma Gandhi
  • Ahimsa
  • Satyagraha
• The Kingdom of God Is Within You
• Frederick Dougl*
• W. E. B. Du Bois
• Mary McLeod Bethune

Related

• Jim Crow laws
• Lynching in the United States
• Plessy v. Ferguson
  • Separate but equal
• Buchanan v. Warley
• Hocutt v. Wilson
• Sweatt v. Painter
• Hernandez v. Texas
• Loving v. Virginia
• African-American women in the movement
• Fifth Circuit Four
• 16th Street Baptist Church
• Kelly Ingram Park
• A.G. Gaston Motel
• Brown Chapel
• Dexter Avenue Baptist Church
• Holt Street Baptist Church
• Edmund Pettus Bridge
• March on Washington Movement
• African-American churches attacked
• List of lynching victims in the United States
• Freedom songs
  • "*baya"
  • "Keep Your Eyes on the Prize"
  • "Oh, Freedom"
  • "This Little Light of Mine"
  • "We Shall Not Be Moved"
  • "We Shall Overcome"
• Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam
  • "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence"
• Watts riots
• Voter Education Project
• 1960s counterculture
• Eyes on the Prize

Honoring

• In popular culture
• Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial
  • other King memorials
• Birmingham Civil Rights National Monument
• Medgar and Myrlie Evers Home National Monument
• Freedom Rides Museum
• Freedom Riders National Monument
• Civil Rights Memorial
• National Civil Rights Museum
• National Voting Rights Museum
• St. Augustine Foot Soldiers Monument
• Civil Rights Movement Archive
• King Center for Nonviolent Social Change

Noted
historians

• Taylor Branch
• Clayborne Carson
• John Dittmer
• Michael Eric Dyson
• Chuck *er
• Adam Fairclough
• David Garrow
• David Halberstam
• Vincent Harding
• Steven F. Lawson
• Doug McAdam
• Diane McWhorter
• Charles M. Payne
• Timothy Tyson
• Akinyele Umoja
• Movement photographers

:Civil rights movement portal