King Adviser James Bevel Died of Pancreatic Cancer

King Adviser James Bevel, 72; Incest Sentence Clouded Legacy

 

By Alexander Remington Washington Post December 20, 2008 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/19/AR2008121903432.html?wpisrc=newsletter

 

The Rev. James L. Bevel, 72, a fiery top lieutenant of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and a force behind civil rights campaigns of the 1960s whose erratic behavior and conviction on incest charges tarnished his legacy, died in Virginia on Dec. 19 of pancreatic cancer.

 

Sherrilynn Bevel, a daughter, said he died at her home in Springfield. She said Rev. Bevel, who was freed on bond because of ill health, had been there since Nov. 8.

 

"Jim Bevel was Martin Luther King's most influential aide," said civil rights historian David J. Garrow. He cited Rev. Bevel's "decisive influence" on the Birmingham "children's crusade" of 1963 that helped revive the movement, the voting rights march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 and King's increased outspokenness against the Vietnam War.

 

Rev. Bevel, an ordained Baptist minister, came to prominence while he was Alabama project coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a civil rights organization led by King.

 

In the early 1960s, the SCLC campaigned to desegregate Birmingham's downtown stores, which led police commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor to respond with police attack dogs and fire hoses at full blast against the peaceful protesters.

 

Over the objections of King and his other advisers, Rev. Bevel rallied youngsters in Birmingham to the frontlines of civil rights demonstrations. He argued that children old enough to accept Christ were old enough to live their faith.

 

On May 2, 1963, the children began marching from the 16th Street Baptist Church, and 600 were arrested on that first of two days of protests. Through media coverage, which focused on Connor's violent treatment of the children, public opinion began to turn in favor of the civil rights movement.

 

However, violence persisted in Birmingham, including the Sept. 15 dynamite bombing that year that claimed the lives of four black girls during services at the 16th Street Baptist Church.

 

Afterward, Rev. Bevel proved a key figure in the 1965 march from Selma to the Alabama capital, Montgomery. The march was prompted in large part by the fatal shooting that February of a young protester, Jimmie Lee Jackson, by an Alabama state trooper.

 

Rev. Bevel and activist Bernard LaFayette Jr. went to meet with Jackson's family and asked Jackson's grandfather to march with them. The next day at a mass meeting, Rev. Bevel "announced that he was gonna march, and who else was with him? And everyone stood up," LaFayette said in an interview.

 

The chain of events touched off by the police violence that ensued -- all captured on national television -- culminated in the passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

 

All through this period, Rev. Bevel was respected as a preacher as much as a strategist. In an interview, Jesse Jackson called him a "creative genius," while Barnard College sociologist Jonathan Rieder, a King expert, said Rev. Bevel "was as brilliant an orator and more inventive than King."

 

Wearing a yarmulke on his head in honor of Old Testament prophets, Rev. Bevel won arguments among King's inner circle by quoting the Bible. He once asked activist John Lewis, now a U.S. congressman from Georgia, "Why you always preaching this social gospel and not the Gospel gospel?"

 

Rev. Bevel grew active in the anti-war movement, once suggesting an "international peace army" to unite civil rights and antiwar activists. He had a great effect on King's thinking, notably urging King to confront the Vietnam War more directly.

 

King's final Sunday sermon, at Washington National Cathedral, focused on the war; days later, on April 4, 1968, he was assassinated in Memphis. Rev. Bevel, who was standing in the hotel parking lot below the balcony where King was shot, helped lead many of King's unfinished projects, including a demonstration to support striking Memphis sanitation workers.

 

But Rev. Bevel was forced out of the SCLC for his disturbing personal behavior. Lewis wrote in his memoir "Walking With the Wind" that Rev. Bevel once cloistered himself in a hotel room with Spelman College students, declared himself a prophet and forced them to drink his urine as a loyalty test.

 

More publicly, Rev. Bevel also embarrassed many in the movement with his support of claims of innocence by the late King assassin James Earl Ray.

 

"Bevel had so much hope, so much optimism," Lewis told the Atlanta Journal and Constitution in 2000. "I think it was too much for him and many others when King died."

 

James Luther Bevel was born Oct. 19, 1936, in the farming community of Itta Bena, Miss., also the birthplace of Marion Barry, the D.C. Council member and former mayor. He was one of 17 children born to a sharecropper father and a mother who frequently beat the children.

 

His early life included stints in the Navy and work as a doo-wop singer. He disbanded the group to enter the ministry and graduated in 1961 from Nashville's American Baptist Theological Seminary, where he met fellow students LaFayette and Lewis.

 

After King's death, Rev. Bevel fell into a long association with fringe movements. He was the 1992 vice presidential running mate of independent candidate Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr., who was then in a federal prison serving a sentence for mail fraud and income tax evasion.

 

Rev. Bevel returned to the headlines for helping Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan conceive the 1995 Million Man March.

 

Rev. Bevel was married four times, including once to activist Diane Nash. He fathered 16 children with seven women.

 

In April, a Loudoun County judge convicted him of having sex in the early 1990s with his then-teenage daughter, and he was sentenced in October to 15 years in prison. He was living in Loudoun County when the crime occurred.

 

At the time of his conviction, Rev. Bevel accused people of plotting against him. "I'm a social scientist," he said. "Who are these people? Are they communist guys? Who is trying to destroy me?"

 

Staff writer Hamil R. Harris contributed to this report.

 

Donations can be sent to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD 21218.  Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net

 

"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs