A Mission of Nonviolence

by Beverly Keel

As was often the case, Bernard Lafayette Jr., a soft-spoken 27-year-old with the physique of a No. 2 pencil, lingered after an April 4, 1968, morning staff meeting to clarify a few things his boss had said.

Lafayette was the national program coordinator of the poor people’s campaign for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an organization co-founded by Martin Luther King Jr. in 1957 to promote the philosophy of nonviolent resistance for justice and human rights. After the other staffers left the room, Lafayette spent a few private moments with King in a Lorraine Motel room before they began their busy day in Memphis, Tenn.

“It was almost like he had a premonition,” Lafayette recalls. “He was telling me things that I needed to do—like go back to school and prepare for the future—because we were going to witness a period of violence, but this period of violence was going to run its course and people were going to become more receptive to nonviolence.

“He said the next movement he wanted to have was to internationalize and institutionalize nonviolence … that was the last conversation I had with him.”

Lafayette, now 63, has dedicated the last 36 years to carrying out King’s wishes of using nonviolence to solve problems at institutions such as churches, schools and police departments, both locally and internationally. “If nonviolence is a part of our entire system and institutions as a way to solve problems, then you eliminate violence as a means of doing that,” he says. “We would evolve to a higher level.”

An ordained Baptist minister who holds a doctorate degree from Harvard University, he serves as scholar-in-residence at the University of Rhode Island, where he directs the university’s Center for Nonviolence and Peace Studies, in Kingston (pop. 5,446). He’s trained thousands of police officers in South Africa, Miami, Detroit and Rhode Island, and helped establish the U.S. Institute for Peace in Washington, D.C. He’s now focused on creating 10 “super centers” for nonviolence around the world.

“These centers will be places where people can come and train, do research and learn skills to develop nonviolence centers and programs in their regions,” he says. In addition to existing centers in Detroit and Miami, he has helped establish nonviolence centers in Colombia, Cuba and South Africa, and is working on opening facilities in the Middle East, China, Ireland and Jamaica.

“As Dr. King said, ‘It is either nonviolence or non-existence,’” Lafayette says. “The frightening thing is that we have the capability of doing mass destruction, so I don’t think we have any choice at this point. We have to figure out how we can live in peace with people. We have different values, but we have similar goals and we can work on accomplishing them together once we put our minds together.”

Sacrificing for peace

In 2002, Lafayette co-led a 120-mile peace march to an embattled mountain village in Colombia, the world’s murder capital, when guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia kidnapped him and three others, including Guillermo Gaviria, the governor of Antioquia. Lafayette was released, but the governor was later killed. “Most people think of nonviolence as passive,” he says. “Nonviolence is just the opposite; it is very active. We can’t simply be concerned about what would happen to us if we went to Colombia. We have to be concerned about what would happen to the Colombian people if we didn’t go.”

Despite the dire situation, Lafayette says he never feared for his life. “When you get at this level of nonviolence, your life is your least worry, except you might not get all the work you want done,” he says. “But in comparison to others, I’ve lived a long time and I’ve gotten a lot of work done. I feel pretty fulfilled, but there’s a lot more work that needs to be done. That’s the only fear.”

His life mission of civil rights and justice has thrust the Tampa, Fla., native into harm’s way numerous times. As a young man, he was one of eight students who led the Nashville Movement to desegregate the Tennessee capital in 1960. “Of all the people in the movement, he was the easiest one to underestimate,” says author David Halberstam, who wrote of the civil rights movement in his book, The Children. “He’s a very quiet American hero.”

Lafayette participated in the 1961 Freedom Rides, which protested the South’s segregation policies, and directed the 1962 Alabama Voter Registration Project, which registered and mobilized black voters. Arrested 27 times and repeatedly beaten, he was convinced he would probably have to give his life for his cause, but he was not afraid to get his hands dirty—even bloody, as long as the blood was his own. On June 12, 1963, he was attacked by two Ku Klux Klan members in Mississippi, an assault that was part of the same KKK conspiracy that claimed the life of civil rights leader Medgar Evers later that night.

“Life cannot be lived to the fullest until you press your spirit against those forces that threaten life,” he says. “The greatest danger is to learn to co-exist with evil and come to the conclusion that there is nothing you can do about it. We were more alive than we ever were when we were struggling in the movement and facing death.”

An education in nonviolence

These days, Lafayette is focused on the future, so he’s spending a great deal of time working with Rhode Island students of all ages. “You have to put nonviolence courses in every school,” he says. “That’s going to reduce domestic violence and police brutality and the number of people incarcerated.

“I try to help children understand that to marginalize people in their class and to not include them is a form of violence,” he says. “It’s also a security issue, because if people feel alienated and not a part of a community, they have no sensitivity or responsibility. When they feel that way, they have no regard for any pain or injury they might inflict on a group.”

He’s training college students to teach nonviolence courses in prisons, and the University of Rhode Island offers an on-campus course called Literature for Changing Lives for those on court probation. He’s also training 200 Rhode Island teachers so that they can pass along his philosophy of conflict resolution to their students.

He meets monthly with students from Moses Brown, a private Quaker school in Providence, and he’s spent the last four years working with students from Wakefield Elementary School in Wakefield, R.I. (pop. 8,468).

“He brings his visions from the past to create hope for the future,” says Wakefield fifth-grade teacher Robin Wildman, who also teaches nonviolence to other teachers. “He teaches kids that they have a responsibility to stand up for justice, no matter who it involves.

“You don’t walk by when someone is being teased, and you treat people with friendliness and you work to create the peaceful community that Dr. King believed in,” Wildman adds. “They can problem solve and they feel empathy for others. It’s a nice way to form a community.”

Lafayette took a group of Wakefield students on a tour of the major Southern landmarks of the civil rights movement. “It was life-changing for everybody,” Wildman says.

Four years ago, a student asked him if he had ever written a book on nonviolence for children. “I said, ‘No, I don’t have time because I’m too busy,’” he says. “‘If you’d like to write a book, I would be willing to be your free consultant.’” That book, tentatively titled Peace Is Like Sunshine: Spread the Warmth, will be released this year.

“It’s absolutely fascinating what these young kids are able to figure out and think,” Lafayette says. “They are uninhibited, so they are unlimited in their thinking. If you ask them about a problem, they come up with five different solutions. I’m getting material and learning from them.”

Beverly Keel is an editor for American Profile.

first appeared: 1/11/2004