The man who pushed for voter rights has died.
Bernard LaFayette was 85 years old.
His son, Bernard LaFayette, III, said his father died on March 5 of a heart attack, according to The Associated Press.
The AP said LaFayette set the stage for what eventually led to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
He was among a delegation of students who founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1960. He had moved from Florida to Nashville to study at what was then called American Baptist Theological Seminary, now known as American Baptist College.
The SNCC was formed by LaFayette with other leaders such as John Lewis, Marion Barry and others under the mentorship of Rev. James Lawson, The Tennessean said.
The group organized voting rights campaigns in the South.
What he learned there, non-violence, dictated his life.
“Non violence is not something that you simply embrace with your mind,” LaFayette said. “It embodies and affects your entire being.”
The group staged a sit-in at a Nashville department store, which then grew into other protests at Woolworths and other businesses.
His work made Nashville the first city in the South to desegregate public spaces, The Tennessean said.
After sit-ins, he took part in Freedom Rides in 1961.
He pushed to include Selma in the movement and was named the director of the Alabama Voter Registration Campaign in 1963, moving to the city with his former wife, the AP said.
He worked saying that change could happen and made it so big that the mission and the momentum could not be stopped. He wrote about his work in his book, “In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma.”
But with the momentum came danger. He was the target of an assassination attempt the same night Medgar Evers was killed. It was part of a conspiracy to kill civil rights workers, the FBI determined, according to the AP.
LaFayette was beaten outside his home and had a gun pointed at him before a neighbor came out of his home with a rifle. But LaFayette himself intervened, standing between the two men, asking the neighbor not to shoot the man who allegedly beat him.
LaFayette recounted the night, saying he felt “an extraordinary sense of internal strength instead of fear.”
His work took him to Chicago before the Selma March happened, and he had planned to be there on day two.
“I felt helpless at a distance,” he said of Bloody Sunday. “I was stricken with grief, concerned that so many people in my beloved community were hurt, possibly killed.”
In 1967, LaFayette was a program coordinator for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, The Tennessean said.
American Baptist said LaFayette embodied the school’s mission, writing on social media:
“He rode buses through a violent South. He registered voters in the face of danger. He marched alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He later returned to lead this institution as our President — and never stopped teaching the world that change is possible through love, courage, and the power of nonviolence."