2026-03-05T22:44:00-0500 / CBS/AP
据美联社报道，伯纳德·拉法耶特（Bernard LaFayette）——为阿拉巴马州塞尔玛市选民登记运动做了风险重重的基础工作，最终促成1965年《选举权法》通过的先锋人物——去世了。
他的儿子伯纳德·拉法耶特三世（Bernard LaFayette III）表示，父亲于周四早晨因心脏病发作去世，享年85岁。
伯纳德·拉法耶特三世在2018年2月22日加利福尼亚州洛杉矶斯克博尔文化中心举行的纪录片《从塞尔玛传递火炬到今天》放映会上登台发言。 （Maury Phillips / Getty Images）
1965年3月7日，未来国会议员约翰·刘易斯（John Lewis）及选举权运动游行者在塞尔玛的埃德蒙·佩特斯桥（Edmund Pettus Bridge）遭殴打，当晚新闻报道震惊全国良知，推动国会采取行动。但在“血腥星期日”（Bloody Sunday）发生的两年前，正是拉法耶特悄然为塞尔玛运动及后续选举权进展奠定了基础。
拉法耶特是1960年纳什维尔学生代表团成员之一，该代表团协助创立了学生非暴力协调委员会（SNCC），在南方各地组织种族融合和选举权运动。拉法耶特回忆，经过初步侦察后，SNCC曾认为“白人太刻薄，黑人太害怕”，因此将塞尔玛从活动名单中划掉。
但他坚持尝试。1963年，拉法耶特被任命为阿拉巴马州选民登记运动主任，搬到塞尔玛。他与前妻科利亚·利德尔（Colia Liddell）一起，逐步培养当地人的领导能力，让他们相信变革是可能的，并积蓄了不可阻挡的势头。他在2013年回忆录《在和平与自由中：我在塞尔玛的旅程》中描述了这段经历。
拉法耶特面临诸多危险，其中包括在密西西比州梅加·埃弗斯（Medgar Evers）被谋杀的当晚，他也遭到暗杀企图。联邦调查局称这是一起杀害民权工作者的阴谋。拉法耶特在家门外被殴打，袭击者举枪对准他。他呼救后，邻居持枪赶到。拉法耶特站在两人中间，恳求邻居不要开枪。
他表示，那一刻他感到“一种非凡的内在力量而非恐惧”。他没有反击，而是直视袭击者的眼睛。他在书中写道：“非暴力是一种争取赢得对方认同的斗争，是人类精神的抗争。”
他也承认，邻居的枪可能救了他的命。
1965年塞尔玛运动取得成果时，拉法耶特已在芝加哥开展新项目。他原计划参加第二天的塞尔玛-蒙哥马利游行，因此错过了“血腥星期日”——游行队伍尚未离开塞尔玛就被催泪瓦斯和持棍州警阻止。
“我在远处感到无助，”他写道，“我悲痛万分，担心我深爱的社区里有太多人受伤，甚至可能死亡。”
但他迅速行动，召集芝加哥的人员并安排前往阿拉巴马州的交通，再次尝试游行。两周后，他们踏上了一场胜利游行——此时美国总统林登·约翰逊已向国会提交《选举权法》。
拉法耶特在佛罗里达州坦帕市长大。他回忆称，7岁时曾和祖母试图登上一辆有轨电车，但黑人乘客需在前端付费，再走到后端上车。售票员在他们上车前就开车离开，祖母摔倒了，而他太小无法帮忙。
“我感觉像被一把剑劈成两半，我发誓有一天我会解决这个问题，”他在回忆录中写道。
是祖母认定他注定成为一名传教士，安排他就读于纳什维尔美国浸信会神学院（现美国浸信会学院）。他在那里与刘易斯同住，两人共同领导非暴力公民抗命运动，使纳什维尔成为南方首个取消市中心住宿种族隔离的大城市。
前总统巴拉克·奥巴马在2020年刘易斯去世后的悼词中提到这两位室友：“最高法院在1960年禁止州际旅行种族隔离后仅几周，他们就在圣诞节假期乘车回家时（刘易斯前往阿拉巴马州特洛伊，拉法耶特前往佛罗里达州坦帕），在灰狗巴士上坚持前排就座，拒绝移动，激怒了司机。”
奥巴马说：“想象这两个人的勇气……挑战整个压迫体系。当时没有人保护他们，也没有摄像团队记录这些事件。”
拉法耶特称，当时他们并未完全意识到这些工作的影响。“我们经历了这一切，但这就是我们的日常生活，”他在2021年接受美联社采访时表示，“我们并非试图创造历史或重写历史，只是回应特定时代的问题。”
1961年，拉法耶特在期末考试期间辍学，参加了官方组织的自由乘车运动（Freedom Ride）——这场运动旨在迫使南方当局遵守法院裁决。他在阿拉巴马州蒙哥马利市遭殴打，在密西西比州杰克逊市被捕，成为300多名被送往帕奇曼监狱（Parchman Prison）的自由乘车者之一。
此后，拉法耶特在芝加哥自由运动中培训黑人青年成为领袖，并协助组织租户联盟。
1961年5月，美国民权活动家伯纳德·拉法耶特（Bernard Lafayette Jr.）在阿拉巴马州蒙哥马利参加自由乘车者规划会议。他一手拿笔，一手拿《韦氏新 Collegiate 词典》。 （Lee Lockwood / WSPI / Getty Images）
西雅图安提俄克大学名誉教授玛丽·卢·芬利（Mary Lou Finley）曾于1960年代与拉法耶特在芝加哥合作，称“我们今天拥有的租户保护措施，实际上是芝加哥工作的直接成果”。
芬利还提到，当拉法耶特得知自己的一名秘书的两个孩子因铅中毒生病（当时铅中毒问题尚未被充分认识）时，他组织高中生收集幼儿尿液样本筛查铅中毒，并促使芝加哥开展全国首个大规模铅中毒筛查。
“伯纳德总是在幕后默默工作，”芬利说，她后来与拉法耶特合作开展非暴力培训，“他避免聚光灯。在某种程度上，我认为他觉得如果默默行事，能做更多事。”
拉法耶特还与安德鲁·杨（Andrew Young）和南方基督教领袖会议（SCLC）合作，为马丁·路德·金牧师（Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.）不幸的北方民权运动做准备。金的多次游行遭到白人暴徒袭击，但拉法耶特和杨驳斥了“芝加哥运动失败”的说法。
杨在2021年采访中指出，在芝加哥，他们试图组织的人口规模是伯明翰的20倍，同时要解决从社区融合到学校和就业质量等一系列难题。“我们在每一个问题上都取得了进展，”杨说。
1968年，拉法耶特成为金“穷人运动”（Poor People’s Campaign）全国协调员，并在金遇刺当天上午与他同在洛兰汽车旅馆。金对他说的最后一句话是关于非暴力运动的制度化和国际化。
“马丁·路德·金说，‘现在伯纳德，我们下一步要做的是将非暴力制度化和国际化，’”拉法耶特在2015年塞尔玛接受CBS新闻采访时回忆道。
他将此作为毕生使命：“他们想让马丁·路德·金的声音沉默，但我们在每个地方都能听到他的声音。这就是我毕生致力于的事业，过去、现在都是。”
金遇刺后，拉法耶特重返美国浸信会学院完成学士学位，随后在哈佛大学获得硕士和博士学位。此后，他担任拉丁美洲和平与正义主任、和平研究教育与发展联盟主席、罗德岛大学非暴力与和平研究中心主任、埃默里大学坎德勒神学院杰出高级驻校学者、阿拉巴马州塔斯基吉威斯敏斯特长老会教堂牧师等职。
杨评价道：“伯纳德在拉丁美洲与当地暴力团体合作，在南非与非洲人国民大会（ANC）开展非暴力研讨会，内战期间前往尼日利亚。他几乎走遍了所有受邀的地方，成为全球非暴力运动的先知。”
南方基督教领袖会议主席德马克·利金斯（DeMark Liggins）周四表示，拉法耶特的“遗产惠及美国及海外数十万甚至数百万他帮助过的人”。
在回忆录中，拉法耶特写道，早期组织生涯中挥之不去的死亡威胁让他明白：生命的价值“不在于寿命长短，而在于人们为赋予生命意义所做的一切”。
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/mlk-protege-teaches-nonviolence-to-new-generation/
Bernard LaFayette, civil rights leader and Selma voting rights organizer, dies at 85
2026-03-05T22:44:00-0500 / CBS/AP
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 responding to the problems of the particular time.”
In 1961, LaFayette dropped out of college in the middle of final exams to join an official Freedom Ride, one of many that sought to force Southern authorities to comply with the court’s ruling. He was beaten in Montgomery, Alabama, and arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, becoming one of more than 300 Freedom Riders sent to Parchman Prison.
LaFayette later trained Black youth to become leaders in the Chicago Freedom Movement and helped organize tenant unions.
View of American Civil Rights activist Bernard Lafayette Jr. during a Freedom Riders planning session, Montgomery, Alabama, May 1961. He holds a pen in one hand and a copy of Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary in the other. Lee Lockwood / WSPI / Getty Images
“The tenant protections we have today are really a direct outcome of that work in Chicago,” said Mary Lou Finley, a professor emeritus at Antioch University Seattle who worked with LaFayette in Chicago in the 1960s.
And when he learned that one of his secretaries had two children sickened by lead — a huge problem that was not well understood at the time — Lafayette organized high school students to screen toddlers for lead poisoning by collecting urine samples, and prodded Chicago to help develop the nation’s first mass screening for lead poisoning, Finley said.
“Bernard has always worked quietly behind the scenes,” said Finley, who later collaborated with LaFayette on nonviolence training. “He has avoided the spotlight. In some ways, I think he felt like he could do more if he were doing it quietly.”
LaFayette also worked alongside Andrew Young and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to prepare for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s ill-fated Northern campaign. Several of King’s marches were attacked by White mobs, but LaFayette and Young challenged the notion that the Chicago movement was a failure.
Young noted in a 2021 interview that in Chicago, they were trying to organize a population 20 times larger than Birmingham, while pursuing a range of difficult issues, from neighborhood integration to the quality of schools and jobs.
“In each one of those we made progress,” Young said.
By 1968, LaFayette was the national coordinator of the King’s Poor People’s Campaign and was with King at the Lorraine Motel on the morning of his assassination. King’s last words to him were about the need to institutionalize and internationalize the nonviolence movement.
“Martin Luther King said, ‘Now Bernard, the next thing we have to do, the next movement is to institutionalize and to internationalize nonviolence,’” LaFayette told CBS News in a 2015 interview in Selma.
LaFayette made this his life’s mission.
“Their purpose was to silence Martin Luther King, his voice,” LaFayette told CBS News. “But we can hear it everywhere we go. And that’s what my life was devoted to and has been and is now.”
After King died, LaFayette returned to American Baptist to complete his bachelor’s degree and then earned a master’s and doctorate from Harvard University. LaFayette later served as director of Peace and Justice in Latin America; chairperson of the Consortium on Peace Research, Education and Development; director of the Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies at the University of Rhode Island; distinguished senior scholar-in-residence at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University, Atlanta; and minister of the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Tuskegee, Alabama, among other positions.
“Bernard did work in Latin American with violent groups there. He did nonviolence workshops in South Africa with the African National Congress. He went to Nigeria when the civil war was happening there,” Young said. “Bernard literally went everywhere he was invited as sort of a global prophet of nonviolence.”
DeMark Liggins, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, said Thursday that LaFayette’s, “legacy lives in the thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people he helped both in America and abroad.”
In his memoir, Lafayette wrote that the ever-present threat of death during those early years of organizing taught him that the value of life “lies not in longevity, but in what people do to give it significance.”
https://www.cbsnews.com/video/mlk-protege-teaches-nonviolence-to-new-generation/