The civil rights pioneer Bernard Lafayette, who joined Freedom Rides and fought for voting rights in the Jim Crow South, has died at the age of 85. In the 1960s, Lafayette was a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He later became a faculty member at Auburn University in Alabama, where he lectured on nonviolent social change. Democracy Now! last spoke to Bernard Lafayette in 2020, when he described how a white mob beat Freedom Riders including Jim Zwerg and John Lewis at a Greyhound bus station in Montgomery, Alabama, in May of 1961 as they were protesting segregated interstate travel.

Bernard Lafayette: “Once we got to the bus station, all of the protection disappeared. And we were on the platform, and Jim Zwerg was beaten up, and John Lewis was clobbered. And I got kicked in the chest and had three broken ribs. So, there was nothing you could do with broken ribs, so I went through the entire Freedom Rides with three broken ribs. I didn’t tell my fellow Freedom Riders, because they might have insisted that I not go. So I just kept quiet. I quietly suffered the entire trip.”

Bernard Lafayette was 85 years old.