Bernard LaFayette, leader of Selma voting rights campaign, dead at 85

Rev. Bernard Lafayette, who led the 1965 voting rights campaign in Selma, Alabama, an effort marked by violence toward civil rights workers, died Thursday at age 85.

LaFayette’s son, Bernard LaFayette, III, said in a statement his father died of heart attack.

A Florida native, LaFayette became involved in the Civil Rights Movement while at student at Nashville’s American Baptist College, where he roomed with another future civil rights leader, the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis. The pair, joined by fellow student James Bevel, attended nonviolence training with Rev. James Lawson, who had studied nonviolent resistance techniques in India with Mahatma Gandhi.

The group became central to the effort to desegregate Nashville’s lunch counters and department stores and were among the group of young civil rights activists to found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), members of whom also led Freedom Rides and voter registration drives in the South.

In his 2013 memoir about the Selma campaign, “In Peace and Freedom,” LaFayette wrote that he volunteered to serve as director of the Alabama Voter Registration Campaign for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, despite being told he would not be successful in registering Black residents to vote.

He was severely beaten on June 12, 1963, as part of a targeted Ku Klux Klan effort in three states intended to kill civil rights workers; Medgar Evers, the secretary of the NAACP in Mississippi, was assassinated the same night.

The Selma campaign culminated in an aborted march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery in April 1965, which became known as “Bloody Sunday” after law enforcement officers assaulted marchers, beating them and tear gassing them. A week after the originally scheduled march, a second, successful one, took place.

Prior to the Selma campaign, Lafayette participated in Freedom Rides, part of an effort to desegregate interstate bus travel. He was arrested with other Freedom riders in Jackson, Mississippi and jailed at Parchman State Prison Farm in June 1961, one of 27 times he would be arrested.

LaFayette returned to American Baptist College to serve as the school’s president from 1992 to 1999, also serving as pastor of Progressive Baptist Church in Nashville during the same period.

At the time of his death, LaFayette served as chairman of the board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an Atlanta-based civil rights organization founded in 1957 by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. He is survived by his wife, Kate Bulls Lafayette, and two sons, Bernard, III, and James.