Life and work of Bernard LaFayette remembered throughout Alabama

Bernard LaFayette, a key figure in Selma who helped efforts that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, has died at 85.

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

LaFayette was scheduled to be in Selma this week for the annual Bridge Crossing Jubilee, according to organizer and former state Sen. Hank Sanders. LaFayette was to receive the Martin & Coretta King International Lifetime Peace & Justice Award on Sunday at the Martin & Coretta King Unity Breakfast.

“Dr. LaFayette was a great man,” Sanders said. “He had the courage to come to Selma when others shied away. He had the foresight to come to Selma when others could not see how that made sense. He contributed tremendously to the Voting Rights Movement, but he did not stop there. Dr. Lafayette contributed to peace and nonviolence every day of his life. This is a great loss to his family. This is also a great loss to me and my family and to all humanity.”

As a young leader in the Nashville Student Movement and a co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, LaFayette helped organize and lead sit-ins, Freedom Rides and other nonviolent campaigns. He was arrested, imprisoned and  beaten.

Sanders says Lafayette was a primary organizer of the Selma Voting Rights Movement and the Selma to Montgomery marches. As a chief strategist, he helped choose Selma because it was considered the most resistant to change in the South. He organized mass meetings, strengthened local leadership and trained people in nonviolence to withstand arrests, threats, and beatings and persevere. Just before he was assassinated, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. asked him to lead the Poor People’s Campaign to Washington, D.C., Sanders said.

LaFayette was one of a delegation of Nashville students who in 1960 had helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which organized desegregation and voting rights campaigns across the South. SNCC crossed Selma off its map after some initial scouting determined “the white folks were too mean and the Black folks were too scared,” LaFayette said.

But he insisted on trying anyway. Named director of the Alabama Voter Registration Campaign in 1963, LaFayette moved to the town and, with his former wife Colia Liddell, gradually built the leadership capacity of the local people, convincing them change was possible and creating momentum that could not be stopped. He described this work in a 2013 memoir, “In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma.”

The many dangers LaFayette faced included an assassination attempt on the same night Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi, in what the FBI said was a conspiracy to kill civil rights workers. LaFayette was beaten outside his home before his assailant pointed a gun at him. His calls for help brought out a neighbor with a rifle. LaFayette found himself standing between the two men, asking his neighbor not to shoot.

LaFayette said he felt “an extraordinary sense of internal strength instead of fear” at that moment. Rather than fight back, he looked his attacker in the eyes. Nonviolence is a fight “to win that person over, a struggle of the human spirit,” he wrote.

He also acknowledged that his neighbor’s gun may have been what saved his life.

LaFayette was already working on a new project in Chicago by the time his work in Selma came to fruition in 1965. He had planned to join the Selma-to-Montgomery march on day two, so he missed Bloody Sunday when the march was stopped by tear gas and club-wielding state troopers before it even got out of Selma.

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

But he shifted quickly, rounding up people in Chicago and arranging transport to Alabama for a second attempt. They set off two weeks later on what had become a victory march: President Lyndon Johnson had introduced the Voting Rights Act to Congress.

Inspired by his grandmother

LaFayette grew up in Tampa, Florida, where he recalled trying to board a trolley with his grandmother when he was 7 years old. Black passengers had to pay at the front, then walk to the back to climb on. But the conductor began to pull away before they could board, and his grandmother fell. He was too little to help.

“I felt like a sword cut me in half, and I vowed I would do something about this problem one day,” he wrote in his memoir.

It was his grandmother who decided he was destined to become a preacher. She arranged for him to attend Nashville’s American Baptist Theological Seminary (now American Baptist College), where he roomed with Lewis, and both helped lead the nonviolent civil disobedience campaign that led to Nashville becoming the first major Southern city to desegregate its downtown accommodations.

President Barack Obama spoke about the roommates in a eulogy after Lewis died in 2020, recalling how they integrated a Greyhound bus while riding home for Christmas break (Lewis to Troy, Alabama, and LaFayette to Tampa, Florida) just weeks after the Supreme Court banned segregation in interstate travel in 1960.

The two sat up front and refused to move, angering the driver, who stormed off at every stop, all through the night.

“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 has said they didn’t fully realize the impact of all this work at the time.

“We lived through this, but this was our daily lives,” he told The Associated Press in a 2021 interview. “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.”

Freedom Rides of 1961

In 1961, LaFayette dropped out of college in the middle of final exams to join an official Freedom Ride, one of many that sought to force Southern authorities to comply with the court’s ruling. He was beaten in Montgomery, Alabama, and arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, becoming one of more than 300 Freedom Riders sent to Parchman Prison.

LaFayette later trained Black youth to become leaders in the Chicago Freedom Movement and helped organize tenant unions.

“The tenant protections we have today are really a direct outcome of that work in Chicago,” said Mary Lou Finley, a professor emeritus at Antioch University Seattle who worked with LaFayette in Chicago in the 1960s.

And when he learned that one of his secretaries had two children sickened by lead — a huge problem that was not well understood at the time — Lafayette organized high school students to screen toddlers for lead poisoning by collecting urine samples, and prodded Chicago to help develop the nation’s first mass screening for lead poisoning, Finley said.

“Bernard has always worked quietly behind the scenes,” said Finley, who later collaborated with LaFayette on nonviolence training. “He has avoided the spotlight. In some ways, I think he felt like he could do more if he were doing it quietly.”

LaFayette also worked alongside Andrew Young and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to prepare for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s ill-fated Northern campaign. Several of King’s marches were attacked by white mobs, but LaFayette and Young challenged the notion that the Chicago movement was a failure.

Young noted in a 2021 interview that in Chicago they were trying to organize a population 20 times larger than Birmingham’s, while pursuing a range of difficult issues, from neighborhood integration to the quality of schools and jobs. “In each one of those we made progress,” Young said.

By 1968, LaFayette was the national coordinator of the King’s Poor People’s Campaign and was with King at the Lorraine Motel on the morning of his assassination. King’s last words to him were about the need to institutionalize and internationalize the nonviolence movement. LaFayette made this his life’s mission.

After King died, LaFayette returned to American Baptist to complete his bachelor’s degree and then earned a master’s and doctorate from Harvard University. LaFayette 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 the Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta; and minister of the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Tuskegee, Alabama, among other positions.

“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.”

In his memoir, LaFayette wrote that the ever-present threat of death during those early years of organizing taught him that the value of life “lies not in longevity, but in what people do to give it significance.”

Other reaction to LaFayette’s death

“As the nation remembers the civil rights martyrs of ‘Bloody Sunday,’ we have sadly lost one of this country’s strongest advocates in the ongoing struggle to make our democracy more inclusive and open for all,” Tafeni English-Relf, Alabama state director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, said. “Without LaFayette’s courage, the realities of so many lives may be different today.”

“As a young Cub Scout growing up in Tuskegee, Alabama, I had the privilege of meeting Dr. Bernard Lafayette,” Tuskegee Mayor Chris Lee said. “Even at a young age, I recognized that I was in the presence of someone who had helped shape history.
Today, as mayor of Tuskegee, I understand clearly that I — along with so many elected leaders across this nation — benefit from the sacrifices made by Dr. Lafayette and those who stood courageously in the Civil Rights Movement.”

Lee says the City of Tuskegee will officially recognize Dr. Bernard Lafayette at its next City Council meeting.

Dr. Bernard LaFayette (left) with Alabama Congresswoman Terri Sewell and Kate LaFayette – Photo from the Office of Alabama Congresswoman Terri Sewell

“I am deeply saddened by the passing of Bernard LaFayette, a giant of the Civil Rights Movement and lifelong champion of justice, equality, and nonviolence,” Congresswoman Terri Sewell (D-Alabama) said.

“Through his ministry, scholarship, and leadership, Bernard LaFayette worked to ensure that the principles of justice and peaceful resistance would endure for generations to come. My thoughts and prayers are with his wife, Kate, as well as his family, friends, and all those whose lives he touched. May we honor his extraordinary legacy by recommitting ourselves to the work of building that Beloved Community. May he Rest in Peace and Power,” Congresswoman Sewell said.

The League of Women Voters released this statement:

“The League of Women Voters honors the life and legacy of Bernard Lafayette, Jr., a towering leader in the Civil Rights Movement whose life’s work helped move this nation closer to its democratic ideals.

“As communities gather in Selma, Alabama, this weekend to commemorate Bloody Sunday, the timing of his passing is a powerful reminder of the courage and conviction required to challenge injustice and bring about lasting change.

“As we honor his legacy, we are reminded that the progress secured by that generation demands continued vigilance. The League remains committed to carrying forward the work of protecting and expanding the freedom to vote for every American.”

(Copyright 2026 The Associated Press contributed to this report. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.)