"Violence must be met with extreme nonviolence," the civil rights leader told about 100 gathered for Celebration of Community luncheon.
Civil rights leader Bernard Lafayette traced the history of harm toward African Americans and how he devoted his life toward working for justice using methods of nonviolence.
Lafayette, a distinguished scholar-in-residence at the University of Rhode Island, was a leader of the 1961 Freedom Rides and of civil rights movements in Nashville, Tenn., and Selma, Ala.
Lafayette recounted with humor in his voice how, when he was a child, he felt sorry for white people who could not enjoy the pleasure of the spacious back of the bus.
"When I finally got old enough to realize the system of segregation was destroying so many lives, I decided to devote my life to stopping it," Lafayette said.
He spoke to about 100 staff members at a Celebration of Community luncheon on Feb. 9 sponsored by the offices of Equal Employment Opportunity/Affirmative Action, and Training and Development. After his speech, punctuated with the cadences showing his years of Baptist preaching, he received a standing ovation.
(A second component of the Celebration of Community was held Feb. 15 in workshops on cultural identity, self-awareness, bias, and how to create a valuing environment and community. The workshops were conducted by Dough Cureton of CreativiTEAM, a human relations consulting firm.)
As a student in Nashville, Lafayette was inspired by the writing of John Lewis and the leadership of Martin Luther King Jr.
He described how hundreds of blacks in Nashville stopped riding segregated buses, not to bankrupt the bus company, but because "they decided to stop contributing to an evil system."
"My feet is tired but my soul is rested," he said, quoting his grandmother, a maid. "She was tired, but what she was really tired of is being a second-class citizen."
Leading his audience to the late 20th century, Lafayette's voice became loud and angry as he characterized apartheid in South Africa as "22 million black folks against the rest of the world."
Lafayette laced his historical narrative with principles of nonviolence.
"Violence must be met with extreme nonviolence," he said. "When you hold onto truth, you learn to love. This also can be worked in your family. To love, all you have to do is keep on loving and expect nothing in return."
He spoke of his work at URI, where he is helping to establish eight centers of nonviolence throughout the world.
"This is our challenge - we have to come to grips with the fact that we can live in a non-killing society," Lafayette said. "One thing we have to overcome is our ethnic differences."
Afterward, when asked about what Brown could do to improve diversity on campus, Lafayette said, "There's always room for improvement. Everybody's always struggling to do their best."
He also said he was reserving judgment about the shooting of a black Providence police officer by two white officers. "Seek the truth, gather information before you come to some conclusion," he said. "Then justice becomes clearer. Then action should be taken. The energy has to go toward prevention.
"In nonviolence, we have a saying: `Doubt your first impression.'"