Updated March 5, 2026 — CBS/AP
Bernard LaFayette, a key grassroots organizer whose work in Selma helped set the stage for the 1965 Voting Rights Act, died Thursday morning at 85 of an apparent heart attack, his son Bernard LaFayette III said.
A member of the Nashville student activists who helped form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960, LaFayette spent decades organizing desegregation and voting-rights campaigns across the South. SNCC originally judged Selma too dangerous to take on, but LaFayette pressed the effort forward. Named director of the Alabama Voter Registration Campaign in 1963, he moved to Selma with his then-wife, Colia Liddell, and quietly worked to develop local leaders, build confidence that change was possible and create the grassroots base that proved critical to later protests. He told that story in his 2013 memoir, In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma.
LaFayette endured repeated threats and violence. On the night Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi, he was beaten outside his home and had a gun pointed at him in what the FBI later described as part of a conspiracy against civil-rights workers. A neighbor’s rifle may have prevented his killing. LaFayette later wrote that, in that moment, he felt “an extraordinary sense of internal strength instead of fear” and refused to fight back, viewing nonviolence as an effort to win over an attacker.
He was not on the Edmund Pettus Bridge for Bloody Sunday on March 7, 1965 — he was in Chicago on a separate project and intended to join marchers the next day. Learning of the violence, he quickly organized Chicago supporters, arranged transportation and helped bring reinforcements for the second, successful march, which followed President Lyndon Johnson’s introduction of voting-rights legislation in Congress.
Born and raised in Tampa, Florida, LaFayette traced his early sense of injustice to an incident in childhood when his grandmother fell while trying to board a segregated trolley. He went to Nashville’s American Baptist Theological Seminary (now American Baptist College), where he roomed with John Lewis and helped lead nonviolent direct actions that contributed to desegregating downtown Nashville. Former President Barack Obama later recalled how Lewis and LaFayette rode to Tampa in 1960 and sat in the front of a Greyhound bus as the driver repeatedly tried to leave at stops.
In 1961 LaFayette left college during final exams to join the Freedom Rides. He was beaten in Montgomery and jailed in Jackson, Mississippi, one of more than 300 Freedom Riders confined at Parchman Prison. In later years he worked to train Black youth leaders in Chicago, organized tenant unions and pushed for public-health responses after learning children of a colleague had been poisoned by lead — efforts that helped spur early mass screening for lead exposure. Mary Lou Finley, who worked with him in Chicago, said tenant protections in the city today are a direct outcome of that organizing.
LaFayette also collaborated with Andrew Young and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference on northern campaigns, confronting the scale and complexity of problems in cities like Chicago, where housing, schools and jobs demanded coordinated solutions.
By 1968 he was national coordinator of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign and was with King at the Lorraine Motel on the morning of the assassination. LaFayette later recalled King’s charge that he should institutionalize and internationalize the nonviolence movement — a mission he pursued for the rest of his life.
After King’s death LaFayette returned to American Baptist to complete his bachelor’s degree and went on to earn a master’s and a doctorate from Harvard. Over the decades he held numerous academic and leadership posts: director of Peace and Justice in Latin America; chair 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 Emory University’s Candler School of Theology; and minister of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Tuskegee, Alabama, among other roles.
He carried nonviolence work overseas, running workshops in South Africa with the African National Congress, engaging with violent groups in Latin America and traveling to Nigeria during its civil war. DeMark Liggins, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said LaFayette’s “legacy lives in the thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people he helped both in America and abroad.”
Reflecting on the perilous years of direct action, LaFayette wrote that constant threats of death taught him life’s value “lies not in longevity, but in what people do to give it significance.” In later interviews he described his lifelong work as an effort to keep King’s vision of nonviolence alive and to spread it around the world.