Reverend James Bevel (b. October 19, 1936,) the strategist, tactician, and main teacher of nonviolence of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement in America, served as the Director of Direct Action and Nonviolent Education of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) from 1962 to 1969. Born in Itta Bena, Mississippi, Bevel served in the Navy for a time and then attended the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, Tennessee from 1957 to 1961. While attending college, after re-reading Leo Tolstoy's The Kingdom of God is Within You (which he first read while in the Navy and directly led to his honorable discharge) and Mohandas Gandhi's My Experiment with Truth, he joined with others in workshops on Gandhian Nonviolence, taught by Reverend James Lawson. Rev. Bevel also participated in the 1960-61 Nashville Sit-In Movement, choose the riders and participated in the Nashville students continuation of the 1961 Freedom Ride, directed the 1961 Nashville Open Theater Movement, and co-initiated the Mississippi Freedom Movement with Bernard Lafayette.

In 1962, after several years in the Nashville student movement, James Bevel was invited by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to join the SCLC, where, before agreeing to join and on Bevel's insistence, Bevel and King agreed to share work and move ahead on an agreed-upon agenda. As SCLC's Director of Direct Action and Nonviolent Education, Bevel soon initiated, organized, and directed the 1963 Children's Crusade, which sparked public outrage over the City of Birmingham, Alabama's use of fire hoses and dogs to stop elementary and high school children from marching to talk to the city's mayor. In September 1963, immediately after the bombing of the church in Birmingham that killed four young girls, Jim Bevel initiated the Alabama Project, co-wrote the project proposal with wife Diane Nash, and began work Nash and Birmingham student activist James Orange on the plan. From that time they organized Alabama until, in late 1964, SCLC and Dr. King -- who had originally opposed the Alabama Project -- joined the Alabama Project and it became known as the 1965 Selma Right-To-Vote Movement. After the shooting of one of the participants in that movement, Jimmie Lee Jackson, James Bevel called for a march from Selma to Montgomery, which began with "Bloody Sunday" and led directly to United States President Lyndon Johnson asking Congress to immediately write and pass a Voting Rights Act. In 1965 SCLC gave its highest award--the Rosa Parks Award--to James Bevel and Diane Nash.

In 1966 James Bevel chose Chicago as the site of the SCLC's Northern Campaign, where he initiated and directed the Chicago Open Housing Movement. Earlier, in 1963, he had also called the March on Washington as a response to U.S. President John Kennedy asking Dr. King to stop the use of children in Birmingham. Bevel later took over the directorship of the National Mobilization Against the War in Vietnam where he organizing what was the largest demonstration in American history to that date, the march from Central Park to United Nations Building in New York on April 15, 1967. After Dr. King's assassination, which Bevel witnessed, and although he opposed it from the start, he was the director of Non-Violent Education in the Poor People's Campaign in order to handle any problems which arose. He went on to found the Making of a Man Clinic in 1970 and the Students for Education and Economic Development in the early 1980s, and co-initiated the 1995 Day of Atonement/Million Man March in Washington, D.C. , again the largest demonstration in American history as of that date.

Bevel ran as the Republican candidate for Congress from Illinois' 7th Congressional District in 1984, and ran as the vice presidential candidate in 1992 on Lyndon LaRouche's ticket.

James Bevel. who lives in Washington, D.C. with his current wife Erica Henry, has been married four times and has 17 children.

In late May 2007, Bevel was arrested in Alabama after being charged with unlawfully committing fornication. The charges stem from an alleged incestuous relationship he had some time between October 14, 1992, and October 14, 1994 in Loudoun County, Virginia. The accuser is one of his daughters, believed to have been 13-15 years old at the time. Three of his other daughters claim to have corroborated the accusation from their own experiences with their father, who has allegedly admitted to the acts on tape, claiming they were part of the daughters' "religious training." Currently charged in Virginia -- which has no statute of limitations for incest -- Bevel, who has pled innocent and denies all the accusations, faces up to 20 years in prison if convicted. He is free on bond until his trial.

References

• "James L. Bevel, The Strategist of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement", a 1984 paper by Randy Kryn, published with a 1988 addendum by Kryn in Prof. David Garrow's "We Shall Overcome Volume II" (Carlson Pub. Co., 1989)

"Movement Revision Research Summary Regarding James Bevel", an internet paper by Randy Kryn, October, 2005

"Advocate of the People's Rights: James Luther Bevel, The Right To Vote Movement", compiled by Helen L. Edmond, 2007 (Lulu.com)

External links

• The History Makers: Rev. James Bevel
• Bio and discussion
• Article about 2007 arrest