Bevel, James

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Bevel, James

October 19, 1936

Civil rights activist James Bevel was born in Itta Bena, Mississippi. In his early teens he experienced a religious conversion and became well known throughout his town as an inspiring preacher. He was ordained as a Baptist minister in 1959 and received a B.A. from American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee, two years later.

Bevel's childhood had familiarized him with wrenching rural poverty and left him with a commitment to work for an end to racial injustice. In 1958 he attended the Highlander Folk School, an interracial adult-education center in Tennessee that focused on promoting social activism. At Highlander, Bevel had his first in-depth exposure to nonviolent theories of social change and was deeply influenced by the commitment to interracialism of Myles Horton, the school's director. One year later, Bevel attended a Vanderbilt University training workshop for student activists in Nashville sponsored by the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a nonviolent direct action group. Through his involvement with FOR, he became a leader in the Nashville student movement and played a central role in organizing and staging sit-ins to force Nashville businesses to desegregate.

In 1960 Bevel became one of the founding members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a grassroots civil rights organization. The following year, he married Diane Nash, a SNCC activist, and in 1962 they moved to Albany, Georgia, where he became a prominent leader in the Albany movement to fight racism and segregation and became involved in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

In SCLC Bevel coordinated direct action protests and trained student activists. In 1963 he was appointed director of direct action and nonviolent education. He traveled to Birmingham, Alabama, to coordinate SCLC's activities and led a protest march of black children from the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that played a pivotal role in galvanizing Birmingham's black community. He worked closely with his wife, and the couple's ideas were influential in the planning for the March on Washington later that year. Bevel played an integral role in SCLC's attempt to apply nonviolent civil rights techniques in the North, and in 1966 he traveled to Chicago to organize directaction workshops and tenant strikes.

Over time Bevel became involved in a broader range of social and political issues. In the summer of 1966, he worked with the Nonviolent Human and Community Development Institute, and in 1967 he took a leave of absence from SCLC to become executive director of the Spring Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.

Despite his relative obscurity, Bevel was a dynamic and dedicated civil rights leader. He composed several freedom songs—"Dod-Dog" (1959), "Why Was a Darky Born" (1961), and "I Know We'll Meet Again" (1969)—that inspired many in the civil rights movement. He worked closely with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and was at his side when he was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968. Assessing Bevel's pivotal role in the civil rights movement, Ralph Abernathy said, "I guess Bevel was the number three man in the movement [alongside King and himself] because he didn't want the glory or the praise, he just wanted to do the work."

Following King's death, Bevel left SCLC after unsuccessful attempts to focus the organization's agenda on education, international arms reduction, and a fair trial for King's accused assassin, James Earl Ray. By the 1980s, when Bevel reentered the public arena, his politics had shifted to the right. In 1980 he campaigned for Ronald Reagan, and four years later he ran unsuccessfully for the House of Representatives from Chicago on the Republican ticket.

In the late 1980s Bevel centered his attention on education—founding Students for Education and Economic Development (SEED) in Chicago—and international issues, such as human rights abuses in former Soviet bloc countries. In 1989 he formed the National Committee against Religious Bigotry and Racism (NCARBAR), and in the early 1990s he gained prominence as an opponent of capital punishment.

In the opening years of the twenty-first century, Bevel came under much criticism while working for the American Freedom Coalition defending the religious practices of Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church (renamed the Family Federation).

Bibliography

Branch, Taylor. Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–1963. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988.

Garrow, David J. Bearing the Cross. New York: Morrow, 1986.

Kryn, Randall. "James L. Bevel: The Strategist of the 1960 Civil Rights Movement." In We Shall Overcome: The Civil Rights Movement in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, vol. 2, edited by David J. Garrow. New York: Carlson, 1989.

jeanne theoharis (1996)
Updated by publisher 2005

Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History