Bernard Lafayette

Bernard Lafayette Jr. (born 1940) is a longtime civil rights activist and organizer, who was involved in many of the major civil rights campaigns in the American South. His most noteworthy achievement was playing a leading role in organizing the Selma right-to-vote campaign.Cite book | author=Halberstam, David
title=The Children
date=1998
publisher=Random House
isbn=978-0-679-41561-9
pages= ]

Early life

Lafayette was born in Tampa, Florida on July 29th, 1940. His parents were Bernard Lafayette Sr. and Verdell Lafayette. Lafayette spent much of his childhood in Tampa, but also lived in several other places as his father was an itinerant laborer. His family spent two years in Philadelphia, PA, which gave young Bernard his first exposure to integration.

Early career

As a young man, Lafayette enrolled in the American Baptist Theological Seminary. It was there that he was first exposed to the philosophy of Gandhian nonviolence while taking seminars from activist Jim Lawson. Lafayette went on to participate in a series of sit-ins in Nashville, TN in 1960. [Cite book | author=Ackerman, Peter; DuVall, Jack
title=A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict
date=2000
publisher=St. Martin's Press
isbn=978-0-312-22864-4
pages=]

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. When a group of Freedom Riders organized by CORE was violently attacked in the city of Birmingham, AL, the Nashville Student Movement, of which Lafayette was a member, vowed to take over the journey. In May 1961, Lafayette and two other riders narrowly escaped being killed by members of the Ku Klux Klan when their group was attacked in the city of Montgomery, AL. [Cite book | author=Arsenault, Raymond
title=Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice
date=2006
publisher=Oxford University Press
isbn=978-0-19-513674-6
pages=]

elma

In the summer of 1962, Lafayette accepted a position with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), to do organizing work in Selma, AL. Upon arriving in the city, 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. While badly injured, he was not deterred from continuing his work. In 1965, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. decided to use Selma as the focal point of a new movement to gain voting rights for African-Americans. With help from Lafayette and others King organized a series of public demonstrations that put pressure on the federal government to take action, resulting in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Life after Selma

Lafayette went on to work with the fair housing campaign in Chicago, IL, and later became president of the American Baptist Theological Seminary. [ Cite book | author=Lewis, John; D'Orso, Michael
title=Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement
date=1998
publisher=Simon & Schuster
isbn=978-0-684-81065-2
pages=] Today, he is a Senior Fellow at the University of Rhode Island, where he heads 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. [ [http://www.uri.edu/nonviolence University of Rhode Island website] .Retrieved on 30 August 2008. ]

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