Civil Rights Leader Bernard LaFayette, Key Selma Voting Rights Organizer, Dies at 85

Bernard LaFayette, a civil rights leader who played a pivotal role in the movement that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, has died. He was 85.

According to his family, LaFayette died Thursday morning in Nashville, Tennessee after suffering a heart attack.

LaFayette helped lay the groundwork for the historic voting rights campaign in Selma, Alabama, which ultimately pushed Congress to pass landmark legislation protecting the right to vote.

Two years before the events of “Bloody Sunday” in 1965 — when voting rights marchers were attacked by state troopers on Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge — LaFayette was already organizing efforts in the city. As director of the Alabama Voter Registration Campaign in 1963, he worked with local residents to build grassroots support and encourage Black citizens to register to vote despite widespread intimidation and violence.

LaFayette was also among the student activists who helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1960, an organization that organized voting rights drives and desegregation campaigns across the South.

During the civil rights movement, he participated in Freedom Rides challenging segregated interstate travel and was beaten and jailed for his activism.

He later worked closely with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and helped coordinate the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968. LaFayette was with King at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on the day King was assassinated.

After the civil rights era, LaFayette continued promoting nonviolence and peace education around the world, conducting workshops and training programs across the United States, Africa, and Latin America.

Civil rights leaders say LaFayette’s legacy lives on through the countless people he trained and inspired in the struggle for justice and nonviolence.

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