In Peace and Freedom: My Journey in Selma by Bernard LaFayette Jr, Kathryn Lee Johnson (review)

Bernard LaFayette’s focused, powerful memoir, co-authored with Kathryn Johnson, his colleague in the University of Rhode Island’s Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies, is part of the University Press of Kentucky’s “Civil Rights and the Struggle for Black Equality in the Twentieth Century” series. Edited by Steven F. Lawson and Cynthia G. Fleming, the series encourages publication of monographs that deal with overlooked aspects of black civil rights. LaFayette’s In Peace and Freedom contributes to nuanced understanding of the movement for civil and human rights in Alabama in the twentieth century and especially of the Selma Movement. It accounts for LaFayette’s contributions to the struggle as much as for those of persons who risked much without becoming household names—some of whom live in Selma today.

Much has been conveyed to popular audiences about work by Martin Luther King Jr. and members of the staffs of both his Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Selma and Dallas County by the time of the Voting Rights March in 1965. LaFayette’s book makes plain that the ability of movement leaders to turn the spotlight on Selma in 1965 was due to groundwork laid by local activists after World War II. Featuring their photographs in the center of his book, LaFayette calls out the “Courageous Eight” long associated with the struggle for equity and justice in Selma: Ernest Doyle, Frederick Reese, Henry Shannon, Ulysses Blackmon, James Gildersleeve, Marie Foster, J. D. Hunter, and Amelia Boynton. The book deftly places the roles of these and other Alabamians ahead of LaFayette’s own just as he apparently did in 1963 aiming to strengthen their longstanding efforts in a time and place nearly impervious to change. At the same time, he makes a strong case for the necessity of his work as SNCC’s first director of the Alabama Voter Registration Campaign—an idea SNCC thought to abort until LaFayette insisted on the challenge.

Noteworthy are references to street gangs and the characteristics of gang members that LaFayette has long considered transferrable to community organizing and nonviolence. LaFayette not only reveals his experience as a boyhood gang member in Philadelphia but also applies childhood memories to the movement, to explain how and why he trained gang members to lead the Chicago Freedom Movement and took them to Selma to learn about strategy. On a somewhat related note, living under the specter of violence must have taken its toll on LaFayette and locals with whom he sought partnership in a national voter registration effort. LaFayette was one of three persons targeted for death in what the FBI later referred to as the “tri-state conspiracy” resulting in Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers’s murder in the driveway of his Jackson home on June 12, 1963 (71). LaFayette received a powerful blow to the head in his own Selma driveway that day. After being pounded in the head by the butt of a man’s pistol, LaFayette remembers, weaving memory with instruction, that “looking directly at an attacker…reinforces the idea that you are a human being and that he or she is, too…. You can disarm someone…by a nonviolent response, because it is unexpected behavior” (75).

LaFayette gave people the benefit of the doubt. “I can’t know for sure,” he writes, “but I was told that five deputies resigned from the sheriff’s department during my time in Selma…I wonder whether… they could no longer carry out Sheriff Clark’s orders to attack innocent people who simply wanted basic human rights” (71). His giving others the benefit of the doubt results in terrific stories for a memoir. When his car was involved in a wreck (at the fault of a person to whom LaFayette lent his car), the white owners of the other...