I was in the middle of switching TV channels back and forth between watching the memorial services for the late Rev. Jesse Jackson and the conflict in Iran when I answered a call from my buddy Bill.
“Hey man, are you watching the service for Jesse? President Obama’s speech was phenomenal,” he asked.
“I am,” I replied. “And did you hear that Bernard Lafayette just passed away?’
“Humm, don’t recognize the name. Was he once the mayor of East Orange, New Jersey or played fullback in the NFL?”
With a sigh heard only to myself I told him that, no, Bernard Lafayette played a huge role in the Civil Rights movement and was a chief architect of the “Bloody Sunday’ march to Selma. But unlike Reverend Jackson and others, he was rarely in the spotlight and seemed to prefer it that way
Well, just who is Bernard Lafayette and what role did he play in the Civil Rights movement? Glad you asked or wanted to ask.
To be honest, after years of plowing through volumes of books on the Civil Rights movement I recognized but paid scant attention to the name Bernard Lafayette even though his name was frequently mentioned along with Dr. King, Diane Nash, James Bevel, John Lewis, Fannie Lou Hamer, Medgar Evers, Hosea Williams and other icons of the movement.
Now I’m not sure what that may suggest about me or how our history has been written, but my hunch is that Mr. Lafayette figured that he could be a lot more effective as a behind-the-scenes strategist like many other hidden figures in the movement.
Bernard Lafayette, Jr. (July 29, 1940 – March 5, 2026) was an American civil rights activist, organizer and Baptist minister, 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, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the American Friends Service Committee.
Born and raised in Tampa, Florida his family grew up poor, so he worked doing odd jobs at the age of 11. When reminiscing on his childhood, Bernard said: “I had to grow up rapidly. In other words, I didn’t have a childhood.”
Despite being Black in the south, Lafayette said he initially attended an integrated elementary school, and eventually began to go to schools that were still segregated. While he was at the integrated school he said that “even though it wasn’t segregated, I could still see the contrast between the two worlds.”
Lafayette had clear recollections of the racism that he experienced at a young age. When he was seven years old, he was heading downtown with his grandmother when 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 drove off before either of them could board, pocketed their money and left them stranded. This was one of the first instances where he realized that he wanted to do something about how African Americans were being treated.
At the age of twenty, Lafayette moved to Nashville, Tennessee, and enrolled in the American Baptist Theological Seminary, where one of his roommates was the future civil rights activist and congressman John Lewis. During the course of his freshman year, he took classes 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 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-ins at restaurants and businesses that practiced segregation. As an advocate of nonviolence, in 1960 Lafayette assisted in the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee .
In 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality 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 the Ku Klux Klan and were viciously attacked. 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. He and other Riders were 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.
In the summer of 1962, Lafayette accepted a position with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to do organizing work in Selma, Alabama. 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.
On the night of June 12, 1963 (the same night that Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi), Lafayette was severely beaten by a white assailant, but was rescued by an armed neighbor who confronted the attacker. While badly injured, he was not deterred from continuing his work.
Following Selma, Lafayette 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.
I’ll close with two reasons why the late Bernard Lafayette’s coffin didn’t lie in the nation’s Capitol; first because of its devious attempt to erase history not to its liking, the current administration wouldn’t support it and, second, that’s something Lafayette probably wouldn’t have wanted in the first darn place.
RIP Mr. Lafayette. You’re gone but never will be forgotten, Terry Howard is an award-winning writer, a contributing writer with the Chattanooga News Chronicle, The American Diversity Report, The Douglas County Sentinel, Blackmarket.com, recipient of the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Leadership Award, and third place winner of the Georgia Press Award.