Me and Bernard LaFayette Jr.: What I learned about racism from a civil rights pioneer
RIP to a civil rights pioneer who taught me the key to equality: People of different races learning how to sit together.
As the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s funeral unfolds in Chicago today – featuring a fiery speech by Barack Obama and the conspicuous absence of sitting President Donald Trump -- I’m compelled to think about another civil rights pioneer who left us just yesterday:
Bernard LaFayette, Jr.
LaFayette, who died of a heart attack Thursday, was a renown activist, organizer, Baptist minister and teacher. As Wikipedia notes: He played a leading role in early organizing of the Selma Voting Rights Movement; was a member of the Nashville Student Movement; and worked closely throughout the 1960s movements with groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).
I met him during a legendary trip retracing the steps of the Freedom Riders, activists in 1961 – including white and Black people – who challenged federal authorities to enforce integration laws on interstate bus trips. (Read about LaFayette’s story and others, including how Oprah elevated their tales on her program by clicking here.)
They violated the custom in Southern states where Black riders were forced to sit in the back of the bus. As a result, they often got attacked by mobs of white people – LaFayette was among a group assaulted and arrested in Montgomery, Ala.
In 2011, I accompanied a group retracing those Freedom Rides, and I had the privilege of watching him school a group of handpicked college kids in a lecture at the Martin Luther King Jr Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta.
I was so moved by the experience, I wrote about that moment in my book, Race-Baiter: “King was a friend and mentor, teaching LaFayette the principles of non-violent protest and cross-racial dialogue he now imparts, fifty years later, in his own classes at Emory University and (the King Center)…Most importantly, he stressed, non-violent protestors accepted the penalty for breaking a law, even one they felt was unjust.”
One of LaFayette’s biggest lessons centered on the power and purpose of segregation, which he says was aimed at keeping white and Black people from figuring out how much they had in common.
LaFayette introduced me to a concept he called “horizontal segregation,” based on an experience he had growing up in the Tampa neighborhood of Ybor City in the 1940s and ‘50s. Sent to fetch coffee for his parents in the morning, he got to the place so early, no one was around.
So, even though seating around the order counter was supposed to be whites-only, he would sneak a seat while waiting. And only then, did the man who fixed his order start chatting with him as a friend.
“When people sit down together, it implies social equality; that’s why most segregation was horizontal and not vertical,” LaFayette told me. “We could stand and watch the parades together. We used to ride the elevators together. But sitting in a restaurant or a bus terminal, where you see one another as equals?...People forget [segregation] law didn’t just say Blacks had to sit in the back. The rest of the law said whites HAD to sit in the front.”
He taught me three important ideas:
1) Racial segregation and segmentation limited white people as well as black people.
2) Such divides are a tactic – strategies designed by people in power to keep like-minded people of different races from finding power in their unity.
3) The best way to overcome those divides are to spend time sitting in each others’ spaces.
LaFayette convinced me, when it comes to breaking down the race-baiting and division of modern media and politics, we must somehow learn to sit together.
As we sit now -- stuck in the center of the backlash, mired in war, racist oppression, boldfaced lying from our government and corruption aimed at lining the pockets of the powerful – it is tough to find consensus. In too many spaces, the compromise and tolerance necessary for that kind of bridge building has fallen prey to bitter recriminations and hollow demonization.
But Bernard Lafayette Jr. – raised as a child in segregation, inspired to become a civil rights activist after seeing how a callous bus driver disrespected his grandmother – taught me that true equality lies in rejecting hate and division.
Because, as we’re learning in the age of Trump, the division which comes from anger and contention only makes it easier for those in power to keep people fighting each other instead of demanding better from them.