Bernard LaFayette, Selma voting rights organizer, dies at 85

Bernard LaFayette, the advance man who did the risky groundwork for the voter registration campaign in Selma, Alabama, that culminated in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, has died. U.S. Bernard LaFayette, civil rights leader and Selma voting rights organizer, dies at 85 Updated on: March 5, 2026 / 10:45 PM EST / CBS/AP Add CBS News on Google Bernard LaFayette, the advance man who did the risky groundwork for the voter registration campaign in Selma, Alabama, that culminated in the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, has died, according to the Associated Press.Bernard LaFayette, III, said his father died Thursday morning of a heart attack. He was 85. Bernard Lafayette speaks onstage during "Passing The Torch From Selma To Today" documentary screening at Skirball Cultural Center on Feb. 22, 2018, in Los Angeles, California. Maury Phillips / Getty Images On March 7, 1965, the beating of future congressman John Lewis and voting rights marchers on Selma's Edmund Pettus Bridge led the evening news, shocking the nation's conscience and pushing Congress to act. But two years before "Bloody Sunday," it was LaFayette who quietly set the stage for Selma and the advances in voting rights that would follow.LaFayette was one of a delegation of Nashville students who in 1960 had helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which organized desegregation and voting rights campaigns across the South. SNCC crossed Selma off its map after some initial scouting determined "the White folks were too mean and the Black folks were too scared," LaFayette said. But he insisted on trying anyway. Named director of the Alabama Voter Registration Campaign in 1963, LaFayette moved to the town and, with his former wife Colia Liddell, gradually built the leadership capacity of the local people, convincing them change was possible and creating momentum that could not be stopped. He described this work in a 2013 memoir, "In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma." The many dangers LaFayette faced included an assassination attempt on the same night Medgar Evers was murdered in Mississippi, in what the FBI said was a conspiracy to kill civil rights workers. LaFayette was beaten outside his home before his assailant pointed a gun at him. His calls for help brought out a neighbor with a rifle. LaFayette found himself standing between the two men, asking his neighbor not to shoot.LaFayette said he felt "an extraordinary sense of internal strength instead of fear" at that moment. Rather than fight back, he looked his attacker in the eyes. Nonviolence is a fight "to win that person over, a struggle of the human spirit," he wrote. He also acknowledged that his neighbor's gun may have been what saved his life.LaFayette was already working on a new project in Chicago by the time his work in Selma came to fruition in 1965. He had planned to join the Selma-to-Montgomery march on day two, so he missed Bloody Sunday when the march was stopped by tear gas and club-wielding state troopers before it even got out of Selma."I felt helpless at a distance," he wrote. "I was stricken with grief, concerned that so many people in my beloved community were hurt, possibly killed." But he shifted quickly, rounding up people in Chicago and arranging transport to Alabama for a second attempt. They set off two weeks later on what had become a victory march: President Lyndon Johnson had introduced the Voting Rights Act to Congress. LaFayette grew up in Tampa, Florida, where he recalled trying to board a trolley with his grandmother when he was 7 years old. Black passengers had to pay at the front, then walk to the back to climb on. But the conductor began to pull away before they could board, and his grandmother fell. He was too little to help."I felt like a sword cut me in half, and I vowed I would do something about this problem one day," he wrote in his memoir. It was his grandmother who decided he was destined to become a preacher. She arranged for him to attend Nashville's American Baptist Theological Seminary, now American Baptist College, where he roomed with Lewis, and both helped lead the nonviolent civil disobedience campaign that led to Nashville becoming the first major southern city to desegregate its downtown accommodations.Former President Barack Obama spoke about the roommates in a eulogy after Lewis died in 2020, recalling how they integrated a Greyhound bus while riding home for Christmas break (Lewis to Troy, Alabama, and LaFayette to Tampa, Florida) just weeks after the Supreme Court banned segregation in interstate travel in 1960. The two sat up front and refused to move, angering the driver, who stormed off at every stop, all through the night."Imagine the courage of these two people...to challenge an entire infrastructure of oppression," Obama said. "Nobody was there to protect them. There were no camera crews to record events." LaFayette has said they didn't fully realize the impact of all this work at the time. "We lived through this, but this was our daily lives," he told the AP in a 2021 interview. "When you think about it, we weren't trying to make history or trying to rewrite history. We were respondi