In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma

Afterword

149 Afterword Bernard LaFayette Jr.’s riveting account of his experiences in Selma reminds us that the realization of America’s democratic ideals has rarely involved an easy or uncontested march to victory. During the 1960s, civil rights activists in the Deep South faced powerful adversaries determined to defend the traditions and shibboleths of racial privilege and prejudice by any and all means. Part of the problem, as this book reveals in fascinating detail, resided in personal and political chicanery, but the movement for democratization and racial justice also had to deal with institutional inertia and a pervasive popular complacency. Before meaningful change could occur in the lives of African Americans, the structural bulwarks of disfranchisement and second-class citizenship had to be confronted and identified in dramatic fashion, highlighted in a way that would disrupt and confound long-standing political and social conventions. As we have seen, this instrumental drama was exactly what Bernard LaFayette and others accomplished in Selma. In the late winter of 1965, a full ninety-five years after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, the struggle to secure the voting rights guaranteed by that amendment finally commanded national attention. The epicenter of the struggle was a small Black Belt Alabama town where hundreds of nonviolent activists were beaten by state and local police, and where thousands more ultimately gathered for a protest march to the state capitol in Montgomery. By the time President Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law in late July, “Bloody Sunday” and the Selma to Montgomery March had become iconic elements of the civil rights saga. All of this took much of the nation by surprise. Before the dramatic events that unfolded on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and on the road to Montgomery, few Americans had ever heard of Selma, and no one outside of the civil rights movement’s inner circle knew any of the backstory that had precipitated the Selma crisis. 150 IN PEACE AND FREEDOM That backstory—the long-hidden, behind-the-scenes struggle to generate and sustain the local Selma movement—is the subject of Bernard LaFayette Jr.’s remarkable memoir. Though only twenty-two years old when he arrived in Selma in the fall of 1962, LaFayette was already a seasoned veteran of the civil rights struggle. In 1959 and 1960, at the age of nineteen, he had become deeply involved in the Nashville Student Movement, attending nonviolence workshops conducted by Rev. James Lawson and joining other student activists, including several of his classmates at the American Baptist Theological Seminary, in a series of sit-ins and protest marches. In May 1961 he became a Freedom Rider, boarding a series of buses in Alabama in a brave effort to test compliance with two U.S. Supreme Court decisions mandating the desegregation of interstate travel. Arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, he became one of more than three hundred Freedom Riders incarcerated in Parchman Prison during the spring and summer of 1961. Following his release from prison in early July, he, unlike most Freedom Riders, remained in Mississippi, where he helped James Bevel and Diane Nash to organize the Jackson Nonviolent Movement. This effort, which involved recruiting black teenagers, led to an arrest for contributing to the delinquency of minors. After being convicted and released pending an appeal, he resumed his involvement in the Mississippi civil rights struggle—editing the Jackson movement newsletter —and in the wider politics of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In mid-August, he attended a memorable conference at the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee, where a gathering of SNCC activists reconfigured the organization into two wings: one devoted to nonviolent direct action and the other to voting rights advocacy. During three days of debate and sometimes sharp disagreements, LaFayette played the role of peacemaker, counseling his fellow activists that both direct action and voting rights were essential to SNCC’s mission. “A bird needs two wings to fly,” he reminded his departing colleagues. Following the Highlander meeting, SNCC’s executive secretary, James Forman, dispatched LaFayette to Detroit on a special fundraising mission. Three SNCC voting rights workers were in jail in Louisiana, and the organization needed $30,000 in bond money to arrange their release. After spending several weeks in Chicago raising the money, LaFayette Afterword 151 eagerly returned to the South with the expectation that he would be assigned to the directorship of a major SNCC voting...