Hello and thank you for the opportunity to introduce myself.

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My name is Bernard Lafayette, Jr.  I was born on July 29, 1940 in Tampa, FL. and spent a large part of my young life there.  My parents were Bernard Lafayette, Sr., and Verdell Lafayette

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As a young man at the age of twenty, I moved to Nashville, Tennessee, and enrolled in the American Baptist Theological Seminary.  During the course of my freshman year, I took classes in nonviolence at the Highlander Folk School run by Myles Horton, and attended many meetings promoting nonviolence. I learned about the philosophy of nonviolence as lived by Mohandas Gandhi, while taking seminars from activist/professor James Lawson, a well-known nonviolent representative of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

 

I began to use that nonviolent techniques as I became more exposed to the strong racial injustice of the South. In 1959, Diane Nash, James Bevel, John Lewis, and myself, all members of the Nashville Student Movement, led sit-ins, such as the 1960 Lunch Counter Sit-In, at restaurants and businesses that practiced segregation. I also assisted in the formation of a group known as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

 

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. I wanted to participate, but my parents forbade it. After the Freedom Riders were violently attacked in the city of Birmingham, Alabama, the Nashville Student Movement, of which I was a member, vowed to take over the journey. At the time, some civil rights leaders worried that the Freedom Rides were too provocative and would damage the movement. Despite many doubts, these Nashville students were determined to finish the job.

 

In May 1961, in the city of Montgomery, Alabama, I and the other riders were "greeted" at the bus terminal by an angry white mob, members of Ku Klux Klan chapters, and were viciously attacked. Some of us were brutally beaten. Their attackers carried every makeshift weapon imaginable: baseball bats, wooden boards, bricks, chains, tire irons, pipes, and even garden tools.  My friends, William Barbee and John Lewis, were beaten until they fell unconscious.  Lafayette later stated, " I thought they were shooting Freedom Riders." It was the gunshot of Alabama's Director of Public Safety, Floyd Mann, who was fighting for the protection of the Freedom Riders.  I along with other Riders was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, and jailed at Parchman State Prison Farm.  That was June of 1961.  

 

Throughout the the movement, I was beaten and arrested 27 times. 

In the summer of 1962, I accepted a position with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to do voter registration organizing in Selma, Alabama during the summer of 1962.  My wife at the time, Colia Liddell Lafayette accompanied me.  Upon arriving in the city, I began to try to organize mass meetings through local churches.  After much networking, I found the first church that was willing to host a meeting.  I partnered will Dallas County Voter’s League, the group of citizens that have come to be known as the Courageous Eight.  There were teachers, as well as, a group of local ministers.

We 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), there was an attempt made on my life where I was severely beaten by a white assailant.  During that assault, I stopped my neighbor from shooting my assailant.  That did not detour my from my work. 

 

In late 1964, the board of Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) decided to join the ongoing Alabama Project organized by James Bevel, Diane Nash, and James Orange, and chose Selma as the focal point to gain voting rights for African Americans. In early 1965, Lafayette, Bevel, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Orange, Nash and others organized a series of public demonstrations that finally, with the march from Selma-to-Montgomery initiated by Bevel, put enough pressure on the federal government to take action and gave enough support to President Lyndon Johnson for Johnson to demand the drafting and passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.[1]

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I went on to work on the 1966 Chicago Open Housing Movement. I later became ordained as a Baptist minister and later served as president of the American Baptist Theological Seminary.  In 1973, I was named first director of the Peace Education Program at Gustavus Adolphus College in Saint Peter, Minnesota. The Gustavus program was my first opportunity to develop curriculum in an academic setting devoted to peace studies. Lafayette served this Lutheran liberal arts college for nearly three years.

 

I was a Senior Fellow at the University of Rhode Island, where I helped to found 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., now known as Kingian nonviolence.  

 

I am now a Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at the Candler School of Theology, at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia and Chairman of the Board of Directors for The Selma CnTR (Center for nonviolence, Truth, and Reconciliation).  I was honored as a Doctor of Humane Letters from Mount Holyoke College, in May 2012. In 2014, The University of Rhode Island honored me with an honorary doctorate in recognition of a lifetime nonviolence efforts for civil and human rights.