Civil rights leader Bernard Lafayette spoke to a crowded room of Elon University students, faculty and staff Monday evening about his experiences coordinating nonviolent protests starting in 1960. He started by praising Elon faculty and staff for its commitment to global education. Then he challenged students to see difference without allowing it to create a divide.
Mark Dalhouse, director of Elon’s Study USA program, introduced Lafayette by saying, “It’s because of men and women like Bernard Lafayette that we have the right to vote.” Dalhouse then announced that voter registration information would be available at the end of the event.
Lafayette opened his speech by expressing his interest in Elon’s global approach to teaching and learning. “This is a model for modern education,” he said. “Elon is a place where I see there are special experiences that are created for you to prepare yourselves for a different kind of future than we had.”
He also said that the increase in connectedness across the world has launched an era of accepting difference. He challenged students to use this heightened awareness of diversity to continue the legacy of change that began with the Civil Rights Movement.
“Acknowledge the differences, but don’t make the differences make a difference –that’s our challenge,” he said. “What’s happening now is that it’s in your hands. You are going to determine what kind of world we are going to live in.”
It was ownership of his legacy that saw Lafayette through the dozens of violent encounters he had throughout the U.S. Civil Rights Movement. “I had to work on trying to change the system,” he said, “so that my grandmother, in her allotted years, would be respected and would be treated as a human being.”
Lafayette first became a civil rights activist in 1959 as a student at American Baptist College in Nashville, Tennessee. He attended non-violence classes at the nearby Highlander Folk School. After a year of classes, he worked with other young activists to participate in demonstrations aimed at integrating lunch counters, buses and movie theatres. Lafayette then traveled to the inaugural conference of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in 1960.
This launched his involvement in demonstrations nationwide. He participated in the freedom rides in 1961, then helped coordinate the 1965 March on Washington. In less than a decade, Lafayette became a leader in the movement.
He worked with Martin Luther King, Jr. as the national coordinator of the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968. Lafayette spoke with King on the morning of his assassination. Their final conversation shaped the rest of Lafayette’s career.
“He wanted to internationalize and institutionalize nonviolence,” he said. “I decided that I would complete that assignment. That’s what I’ve been doing for the rest of my life.”
Today, he is working with Emory University in Atlanta to set up a center for nonviolence, one of dozens across the nation and world. Elon is one of his stops on a tour across the country that includes both speaking engagements and non-violence training sessions.
“The goal of nonviolence is to win people over,” he said. “The single most important advice that I could give to civil rights workers today is that it’s important to go through the training–leadership training and nonviolence training.”
Dalhouse and the Global Education Center brought Lafayette to Elon to start a conversation about how the work done during civil rights movement is relevant today.
“This is the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act, and he was instrumental in that,” Dalhouse said. “I’m sending students all over the United States to learn. I feel like it’s our responsibility to bring some of that here and challenge students to think.”
Lafayette also acknowledge the need for further conversation about racial discrimination and hatred in the United States.
“When we talk about post-racial period, there’s nothing post about it,” he said in a smaller talk with students of color organized by the Center for Race, Ethnicity and Diversity Education. “When we look at where we are now compared to where we were in the 1960s, we begin to see the reflections clearly.”
While Lafayette made clear his beliefs that work on U.S. civil rights is far from over, he expressed confidence in students at Elon.
Senior Broadway Jackson pointed to apathy as a major problem with the millennial generation’s response to issues of discrimination and hatred.
"Demographically, millennials tend to be politically disengaged and these sort of things that you're talking about, Ferguson for example, tend to be "too much" for a lot of people," Jackson said. "How do we as fellow millennials encourage people to participate and do things like get registered to vote and be politically active and aware? How do we avoid apathy?"
Lafayette left the audience with advice for combating that issue:
“Apathy is a form of violence, whether they’re disinterested or whether it’s fear that causes them not to take a stand,” he said. “About 25 percent of the people who are silent just don’t know how to get involved. You’ve got to look at ways that people can participate and support. You have to help them see how this is going to benefit those around them.”