Civil Rights leader joins hands
coastreportonline.com | Mar 1st 2011 2:45 PM
Dr. Bernard LaFayette Jr. addresses OCC on the
importance of nonviolence and also took questions from the audience.
See Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JmuSsnSwVJM
A hushed silence fell across the crowded Robert B. Moore Theatre as students,
faculty and community members looked towards the empty stage.
Orange Coast College’s Distinguished Speaker Series hosted Dr. Bernard
LaFayette, Jr., who many consider a prominent leader of the Civil Rights
Movement.
“Dr. LaFayette is a leader in the movement of non-violent social change,” Lee
Gordon, instructor of marketing and business, said as he addressed the audience
before LaFayette’s entrance.
LaFayette served as a leader during the Freedom Rides, Selma Movement and the
Alabama Voter Registration Project.
LaFayette worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr., and was with him the day
he was assassinated.
“That morning I was with him in his hotel,” LaFayette said. “He said to me,
‘Bernard the next thing we want to do is institutionalize and internationalize
nonviolence.’”
In a separate interview, LaFayette discussed how the power of nonviolence
related not only to the confounds of the Civil Right Movement in the U.S. but
also around the world.
During the Vietnam War, LaFayette went with a group of Americans to investigate
the repression against the peace movement in Saigon where there were reports of
buddhist monks setting themselves afire in protest.
Once he arrived, he was asked by local students to join in on a protest march.
LaFayette agreed.
“The troops had come around and were confronting us with drawn weapons” he
said. “The Vietnamese students were throwing molotov cocktails at the troops
and I thought for sure this was going to be the end for me.”
However, LaFayette wasn’t going to go down without a fight. He convinced the
students to join hands and march peacefully toward the troops.
“Nonviolence means you don’t run from a situation but using the force of your
soul against the violence itself,” LaFayette said.
Joining hands, he said, was a strategic two-fold counter strike. First, the
students would not be able to throw anymore molotov cocktails. Second, it
showed the soldiers that they were unarmed and prepared to suffer if necessary.
“As we walked forward that moment of truth came and [the troops] also stopped,”
LaFayette said. “They had drawn bayonets and there was a moment of no movement.”
But according to LaFayette something indescribaly was moving deep inside of
everyone there. Ultimately, the soldiers backed away.
Original Page:
http://www.coastreportonline.com/campus_news/campus/article_0baf7d4a-4452-11e0-ac44-001cc4c002e0.html
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