In his book, “The Making of Black Revolutionaries,” James Forman wrote that Rev. Bernard Lafayette authored “one of the finest accounts of just what it meant to be a SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee) field worker in June of 1963 from Selma, Ala.”
Forman said that Bernard and his wife, Colia, both 22, had gone to Selma to spearhead a “frontal attack on one of the most vicious and oppressive places in the Deep South.” That is a vivid opening on the life and legacy of Rev. Lafayette, who died on March 5 at his home in Tuskegee, Ala., of a heart attack. He was 85.
A photo in the SNCC files shows Lafayette with gashes in his head after he was severely beaten in Selma in 1963, two years after completing his indoctrination in Nashville as a Freedom Rider. When he was asked about his commitment to the civil rights movement, he said, “It was not something you read that causes you to change,…it’s when you see other individuals fight against the system and insist that justice will come, and believe that justice will come, even if you have to lose your life.”
Life for Lafayette began July 29, 1940, in Tampa, Fla. He was seven years old when he witnessed his first incident of racism. After paying their fare and reentering a segregated trolley from the rear in Tampa, Lafayette watched as his grandmother was violently thrown to the ground. From this experience and attending church where his grandmother was an organizer in civil rights activities, Lafayette received early lessons that would influence him for the rest of his life.
“She was a businesswoman and a devout Christian home missionary who owned and operated a grocery store and small animal farm,” he wrote in his memoir “In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma” with Kathryn Lee Johnson. “She helped to found a church, the New Hope Missionary Baptist Church in Tampa, and built a congregation. She was my teacher and spiritual mentor, and she played a great role in my pursuit of higher education.”
When he was a teenager, he enrolled at American Baptist Theological Seminary (ABT) in Nashville, where his classmates were John Lewis and James Bevel. As Lewis related in his biography, “Walking With the Wind,” “Bernard was outgoing, but he wasn’t pushy or aggressive the way Bevel was. In fact, he was one of the few people who could handle Bevel and hold his own in a debate with that human hurricane.”
Later, the three of them would unite with other students, including Diane Nash, to lead a sit-in campaign in downtown Nashville. By the spring of 1960, they were the leaders of the Nashville Student Movement, which would later travel to Shaw University and join other activists to forge the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Through these actions, Lafayette became a pioneering force in the movement that took him to the Freedom Riders and deeper into the South. Two years later, he was director of SNCC’s Alabama Voter Registration Project, where, subsequently, he and his wife, under Forman’s guidance, became key fieldworkers in the county.
At some point prior to or in concert with his commitments in Selma, Lafayette was sent to Detroit on a fundraising mission. I missed him here but encountered him later when he lectured my students at City College of New York and, in 2018, at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, where we were panelists. I agreed with Lewis that Lafayette was a slow-talking, deep-thinking man who rarely minced words. Nor was he a man who cowered in the face of adversity, and even after being attacked and badly injured by white men, he continued his voting rights campaign. Though it was mainly Bevel who initiated the Selma to Montgomery march, following the murder of Jimmy Lee Jackson, Lafayette was the field marshal and coordinator of the historic event that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
A year later, Lafayette had taken his leadership and wisdom to Chicago, working with the city’s Open Housing Movement. After being ordained as a minister, he returned to his alma mater, ABT, as its president, as John Lewis had envisioned. In addition to his administrative duties at ABT, he found time to earn two additional degrees, including a doctorate in education from Harvard University. And, to some extent, these were just stepping stones to his becoming the dean at Alabama State University, a senior fellow at the University of Rhode Island, where he was also the recipient of the school’s honorary doctorate for his lifelong leadership in civil and human rights.
Lafayette had been scheduled to receive the Martin & Coretta King International Lifetime Peace & Justice Award on March 8, according to Montgomery, Ala., station WSFA.