Bernard LaFayette Jr. gives a Dean’s Lecture at Candler in 2011. His 1965 mug shot shows in the background.
Civil rights leader Bernard LaFayette Jr. died on March 5 at age 85. From 2009 to 2015, LaFayette served on the Candler faculty as distinguished senior scholar-in-residence. Nichole R. Phillips, associate professor in the practice of religion and society and director of Candler’s Black Church Studies program, shares this tribute.
Amid commemorating and celebrating the life of one civil rights icon, the Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr.—as aptly described by a traditional African metaphor—another “mighty oak has fallen”: the Reverend Dr. Bernard LaFayette Jr.
One of the founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and a member of the delegation of Nashville student activists, Dr. LaFayette marched side by side with both the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Congressman John Lewis, and worked alongside Ambassador Andrew Young and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in both southern and northern contexts during our nation’s most tumultuous and unsettling periods of the 1950s and 1960s.
Despite the constant death threats that shadowed efforts to secure civil rights for African Americans, he nevertheless demonstrated against segregation by joining the Freedom Rides of 1961 and by campaigning for a better quality of life for people on the fringes of American society as the national coordinator of King’s Poor People’s Campaign. His risky, ground‑breaking work in Selma, Alabama, on behalf of voting rights helped lead to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. On the morning of King’s assassination at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, Bernard would also be at King’s side.
Like King, Dr. LaFayette was a global leader and human‑rights activist who issued a clarion call to nonviolence in places such as South Africa, Nigeria, and Latin America, earning him the designation “global prophet of nonviolence.” After King died, he returned to American Baptist College in Nashville, Tennessee, to complete his baccalaureate degree and then moved on to Harvard University for his master’s and doctorate.
The Candler and Emory University communities had the honor and pleasure of having him serve as Distinguished Senior Scholar‑in‑Residence from 2009 to 2015. As a member of Candler’s faculty, he taught courses, guest‑lectured frequently, delivered the annual Howard Thurman Lecture in 2009, and gave the Dean’s Lecture in 2011, where he discussed his experiences in Selma (pictured).
While in residence at Candler, Dr. LaFayette published his memoir, In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma (University Press of Kentucky, 2013). In it, he sums up the value of life as “ly[ing] not in longevity, but in what people do to give it significance.” Though he was known to work behind the scenes, Candler now has the distinction of bearing witness to the significance of his life as a civil rights leader, voting rights architect, and human rights champion.
In this moment of remembrance, we join together in gratitude for a life that shaped the moral landscape of our nation and touched our own community with uncommon grace and conviction. Dr. LaFayette’s witness reminds us that the work of justice is never the calling of one generation alone but a shared labor entrusted to all who believe in the dignity of every human being. As we honor his legacy, may we find renewed courage to walk the paths he cleared, to practice the nonviolence he taught, and to carry forward the hope he embodied. May his memory strengthen our resolve to build a more just, compassionate, and peaceful world.