Rev Bevel Pt 1James Luther Bevel was a minister and a leader of the Civil Rights Movement.
Channel: MentalHouse TV w/Khadijah
Date: 2008-04-15

Civil rights leader convicted of incest
Rev. James L. Bevel, a fiery top lieutenant of 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 Friday in Virginia of pancreatic cancer. He was 72.

Sherrilynn Bevel, a daughter, said he died at her home in Springfield, Va.

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 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, Ala., 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 firehoses 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.

Violence persisted in Birmingham, however, 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 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.

When King 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 Bevel was forced out of the SCLC for his disturbing personal behavior. Activist John Lewis, now a U.S. congressman from Georgia, 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 King assassin James Earl Ray.

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

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, Va., 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.

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