Dr. Bernard LaFayette Jr. – Friend and Support to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

By: Debbie Ellison

Dr. Bernard LaFayette Jr. has been protesting, marching, and strategizing for civil rights for more than half a century.

“You have to appreciate every opportunity you have to serve and to do your very best and to give it all that you have,” he says. “The thing that you want to do is appreciate the fact that time is a powerful force that will determine how long you’ll be able to give your contributions and what contributions you‘re going to make. Is it going to be to yourself or is it going to be to others? And will it make a difference?”

He has made it his mission in life to answer those questions. His life has been about contributing to others and making a difference.

As the current Chairman of the Board of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, co-founder and leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Freedom Rider, he was an integral part of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s staff. Dr. King was his associate, mentor, and friend.

Dr. LaFayette is an expert on nonviolence. He says he learned about nonviolence from Dr. King, James Lawson, and from his own experience.

LaFayette and John Lewis were roommates in Nashville. Prior to the Supreme Court’s 1960 ruling in Boynton v. Virginia declaring segregation in interstate travel facilities unconstitutional, LaFayette and Lewis integrated a Greyhound interstate bus by sitting at the front and refusing to move.

He says, “The bus driver was very upset and he rammed his seat backwards, and it would have broken my legs had I not had my leather suitcase in front of me. But it punched a hole in my suitcase.”

He and John Lewis applied to go on the Freedom Rides. Lewis went, but since LaFayette was under twenty-one, he had to get his parent’s permission. His father would not give his permission and told him, “I’m not going to sign your death warrant.”

After the Freedom Rides were stopped because of violent opposition, he says “we asked CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, if we could continue and they gave us approval. And so, we went.”

While in the bus station in Birmingham during one of the Freedom Rides, LaFayette says he was tired and went to sleep. He says Ku Klux Klansmen were all over the bus station, and one threw cold water in his face.

“In nonviolent training,” he explains, when you have an act of violence against you, you have to not imitate the violence that’s perpetrated against you, but you have to take an action in a way that will show your opponent that there is a better way.

“So I smiled at him, and I said, ‘Thank you.’ He was shocked and confused because he threw cold water on me. One of the reasons I was thanking him is that I did not mean to be asleep in the room, so I appreciated him waking me up. He got the point.

“So you turn a negative into a positive by your response to violence. Then you give your opponent another option. People act because sometimes they don’t have any other options.”

In 1962, at age 22, he volunteered to become the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s director of its Alabama Voter Registration Project, running voter registration clinics in Selma, Alabama. When King launched SCLC’s Chicago Campaign, he appointed LaFayette to help plan and execute the campaign’s direct action program.

Dr. King hired him as SCLC’s program coordinator in 1967 and national coordinator of the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign. He worked alongside Dr. King to organize the Selma-to-Montgomery marches and was instrumental in identifying Selma as the location for the voting rights movement that resulted in the signing of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and ultimately the 1968 Civil Rights Act. He marched with King from Selma to Montgomery, crossing the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

He helped organize and participated in sit-ins at lunch counters in Nashville. “I met Martin Luther King in Nashville when he came to speak at Fisk University auditorium. This was after we had formed the Student Central Committee in Nashville and we had students from different colleges and universities, and we’re the ones that led the demonstrations that brought about the changes that took place in Nashville. This would have been 1960 or ‘61.”

In 1967, King hired LaFayette to be the program administrator over the programs of SCLC.

“Martin Luther King said that my job was to supervise Jesse Jackson and all of the staff over the programs. I supervised these people and a lot of them were older than I was. They accepted my position. Andrew Young was my supervisor.”

In 1968, King appointed him national coordinator of the Poor People’s Campaign, a campaign to gain economic justice for poor people in the United States.

On the night of April 3, 1968, when King made his Mountaintop speech, LaFayette was in Memphis with him to support Black sanitation workers who were striking for safer work conditions and better pay. They stayed at the Lorraine Motel. LaFayette recalls, “He didn’t want to go. He had sent Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young and Abernathy and all the other staff. It was pouring down rain. And I was in the room with Martin Luther King in room 306. We were working on a statement to announce the headquarters of the Poor People’s Campaign.

“When the staff got there, Martin Luther King was already in bed in his pajamas. He got a phone call from Abernathy saying that he was to come to a meeting. He said, ‘I’m exhausted.’

“Abernathy said, ‘These people want to hear from you.’ So, Martin Luther King said, ‘You mean, you want me to jump out of my bed, put on my clothes, come out there in all that rain? It’s raining cats and dogs. Okay, if you say I should come.’” And he got up, put on his clothes, and left. I stayed at the motel and worked on the press statement.

“When he came back, he was enthusiastic. The next morning, I went back to his room. He was trying to recuperate. And when I was ready to leave, he said, ‘Wait, you go ahead and get things started, and I’ll be along later.’ I started out the door again and he said, ‘Our next movement is going to be to institutionalize and internationalize nonviolence.’ I didn’t know what he meant, but I said, ‘Okay.’”

“When I arrived at the airport in Washington DC, [D.C. city councilman] Walter Fauntroy was supposed to pick me up but he never arrived. I needed to find out the status of things so I called AP and UPI, United Press International, listened to their ticker tapes. So, that’s how I knew that Martin Luther King had died.”

“I didn’t make it to the funeral. I walked, and on my way to the church, I had to pass our office. People had broken in and were looting the place. The door was open and they were in there taking things out. They were in tears. Grown men were crying. I knew my role was to make sure they didn’t take all that stuff out of the office. And I had to do it in a nonviolent way, tell people without screaming at them.”

“So by the time I got to the funeral, they were bringing the body out.”

His advice to young activists “is to learn as much as possible from experiences that other people have had and to have an opportunity to put that into practice in training situations where you would have the opportunity to examine and explain it. There’s no substitute for the training. The question is, how do you interpret your experiences? Will you learn from your experiences?”

He has certainly learned from his. And these experiences, though many were challenging, sometimes life-threatening, has shaped his life and made him the great activist and leader he is today.