Biography
Reverend James Luther Bevel was a Mississippi-born civil rights organizer trained by James Lawson in the Nashville student movement. He became one of the most consequential field strategists of the Southern freedom movement: he organized the 1961 Nashville Freedom Riders' continuation into Mississippi after the original riders were beaten in Anniston and Birmingham, helped lead the 1962 Albany Movement, and as SCLC Director of Direct Action conceived and led the May 1963 Birmingham Children's Crusade — the action whose images of fire hoses and police dogs turned U.S. and world public opinion against Southern segregation. He co-wrote and helped strategize the Selma to Montgomery March in 1965, and persuaded Martin Luther King Jr. to publicly oppose the Vietnam War, helping draft King's April 4, 1967 Riverside Church speech 'Beyond Vietnam.'
Bevel was arrested repeatedly during civil rights organizing — in Nashville sit-ins (1960), on the Freedom Rides (1961, served time at Mississippi's Parchman Penitentiary alongside the rest of that group), in Albany, in Birmingham, and in Selma. His total time in Southern jails for civil rights organizing across the early 1960s ran into months. His public legacy is complicated by a 2008 conviction in Virginia for incest (for which he was sentenced to 15 years and which is unrelated to his civil-rights work); he is included in this database for the years he served in the South for organizing.
