Tampa, Florida, native Bernard Lafayette is a civil rights activist who found his voice – and his seat – as a student in Nashville when he began participating in the Nashville sit-in movement in 1960.
Once the Nashville sit-ins ended, it was time to hit the road, and Lafayette joined the Freedom Riders.
“I kept going back and forth to school for a semester or a year at a time, and then when the Freedom Rides came, I went and joined the Freedom Rides,” Lafayette said.
When the Freedom Rides were over, he went back to school for a semester or so, and then got involved in working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee full-time in Selma, Alabama.
SNCC, an organization Lafayette helped found, was conceived in April 1960 when Ella Baker, a staff member for Martin Luther King Jr., prompted student sit-in groups from various cities to create a united independent student group.
“We had completed desegregating the lunch counters in Nashville before the group was formed, but we brought together under the emblem of SNCC other student groups who were still involved in the sit-ins when the group was formed,” Lafayette said.
Lafayette took a break from college and opted to work with a voter registration project sponsored by SNCC.
“SNCC people would go out and establish an office in various places to help people get registered to vote,” Lafayette said. “And those places were mainly in the rural areas of the South.”
Lafayette’s first assignment with SNCC was to raise bond money for three SNCC employees: Dion Diamond, who had been arrested for “criminal anarchy” when he helped people register to vote in Louisiana, and Chuck McDew and Bob Zellner, who were both arrested when they visited Diamond.
Lafayette went from Atlanta to Chicago to raise money, and when the three were freed, he returned to Atlanta to find only one voter registration project left — Selma, Alabama.
“When I got back to Atlanta for my assignment, all the assignments had been taken up. Except there was one that had an ‘X’ through it
Lafayette was undaunted.
“So nothing could be accomplished, so they had put an ‘X’ through Selma, scratched it off the map, you know, we’re not going,” Lafayette said. “So I said, ‘Okay, I want to be director of a project.’ They said, ‘Well, you ought to take a look at it.’ I said, ‘No I’ll take it.’”
Rather than rush to Selma, Lafayette researched the city in Tuskegee’s library. When he finished his research, he headed to Selma. Amelia Boynton, who has become known as the “matriarch of the voting rights movement,” offered Lafayette office space for SNCC, and the two became close friends.
Lafayette, along with many others, began to mount a campaign focused on getting people registered to vote, and they were successful.
“We had a hard time trying to get a mass meeting because people weren’t ready,” Lafayette said. “But we had to help them overcome that fear by showing courage, and they responded. So that was the beginning of the Selma voter registration campaign.”
After his work in Selma, Lafayette traveled to Chicago to participate in the Chicago movement and from there was recruited by Martin Luther King, Jr. to join his organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Lafayette joined King’s staff in 1967 as national programs director. In 1968, King appointed Lafayette as the national coordinator of his last project, the Poor People’s Campaign. Lafayette was with King five hours before the civil rights leader was shot and killed in April 1968.
The 50-year anniversary of King’s death is coming up this year.
Since the civil rights movement, Lafayette has served at many educational institutions and organizations, and he is now a visiting professor of global leadership and nonviolence at Auburn. He continued advocating for civil rights and nonviolence through a number of avenues and said that today, there is still plenty to be done in terms of progress.
One area Lafayette believes still needs to be addressed is voter turnout.
“We have to make sure that the people who are qualified to vote actually vote,” Lafayette said. “Because it’s one thing to get registered, and we need all the people to get registered who qualify. Then, they must turn out to vote.”
He cited Alabama’s latest Senate election as a win in terms of voter turnout.
“When people decide they’re going to get out and vote for someone who represents them, then you can see a difference,” Lafayette said.
Lafayette also mentioned the necessity to educate America’s youth on government operations.
“Because a lot of people do not have an appreciation for how the government operates, all the different departments, what their responsibilities are, what their limitations are and what their duties should be,” Lafayette said. “So educating our young people as to how the system operates is very important because then they can participate in a very effective way and also make sure that the people who are supposed to represent us are representing us and not themselves.”
In the spirit of a movement that defined his life, Lafayette emphasized nonviolence and education. He said it is a responsibility of citizens to closely examine violence in colleges, high schools and overall communities and see how people can address the issue.
“I think the way you do it is to institutionalize nonviolence in our educational systems,” Lafayette said. “And you teach people how to deal with conflict and be able to manage conflict without violence.”
He said managing nonviolence with people who gravitate towards violence on account of other issues should be handled in a “very scientific way.”
“We have ways, we have means, we have knowledge, so all we need is the nonviolence that Martin Luther King talked about,” Lafayette said. “How do you respond to the situations to prevent violence?”
In 1975, Lafayette contributed to establishing a program called the Alternative to Violence Project, centered around teaching inmates how to handle conflict by using nonviolence training.
The program was successful and is now implemented in 60 countries and 30 U.S. states. Examples like this are why Lafayette thinks the implementation of nonviolence education in schools is a reasonable goal that would produce favorable results.
“You could learn how to deal with conflict with nonviolence just like you learn math and English and other things,” Lafayette said. “It’s a skill.”
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