James Bevel

James Luther Bevel was born on the nineteenth of October 1936 at Itta Bena, Mississippi, into a sharecropping family of seventeen children. He served in the Naval Reserve at seventeen, took his ordination in 1959 and his degree from the American Baptist Theological Seminary in Nashville, and trained in James Lawson's nonviolence workshops beside John Lewis, Diane Nash, and Bernard Lafayette — the circle that led the 1960 Nashville lunch-counter sit-ins.

The movement's steepest campaigns bear his mark. He helped carry the Freedom Rides forward in 1961 and was jailed at Jackson. As SCLC's Director of Direct Action he proposed and organized the Birmingham Children's Crusade of May 1963 — King himself credited him with its initiation. With Diane Nash he drafted the Alabama Project after the church bombing that killed four girls; and when Jimmie Lee Jackson died of a trooper's bullet in 1965, it was Bevel who called the people to march from Selma to Montgomery. He led the Chicago open-housing work of 1966, chaired the Spring Mobilization against the Vietnam War in 1967, and on the fourth of April 1968 he stood in the Lorraine Motel parking lot when the shot came.

The after-years wandered — from a campaign to defend James Earl Ray, through fringe politics far from his old comrades, to a hand in convening the 1995 Million Man March.

The record carries the whole man, for the archive's law is truth. In 2008 a Virginia jury convicted him of incest against one of his daughters, committed when she was a teenager — a grave harm this house does not soften — and he died of pancreatic cancer that December, at seventy-two. Both truths stand here, and the house honors the marches while it refuses the silence.