Rev. James Bevel died of cancer on Dec. 19th, 2008. He was 72 years old.
At one point in his life, the Rev. Bevel seemed to be destined to be remembered as one of the true heroes of the Civil Rights Movement. It seemed that his name would be enshrined with the names of Martin Luther King, Megdar Evers, John Lewis, and others. Instead, Rev. Bevel ended up becoming a somewhat unfortunate footnote of human history. By the time of his death, he was all but forgotten except by a select few conspiracy theorists and a handful of people who make it a point to observe the paranoid subculture of America.
In his youth, Rev. Bevel was a close associate of Dr. King's. As a leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Bevel played a key role in such seminal events as the 1963 March on Washington. Bevel organized and led the 1965 Selma Voting Rights Movement, a crusader that played no small part in the passage of the national Voting Rights Act. Bevel was with King when he was assassinated in Memphis and, at the time, one would have had every reason to believe that Bevel was emerge as King's successor as the most prominent civil rights leader in America.
That didn't happen.
Bevel, instead, spent his later years as an associate of two rather dangerous men -- the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and political extremist and cult leader Lyndon LaRouche. He was such a close associate of LaRouche's that he even served as LaRouche's running mate during Lyndon's 1992 presidential run.
LaRouche, of course, has a reputation for being a kook and most people don't seem to take him all that seriously. However, a close examination of the man and his organization reveals an ideology motivated by anti-Semitism, racism, and everything that the civil rights movement that Bevel helped to lead was meant to oppose. There is something quite disturbing about the fact that a man of Bevel's previous accomplishments would end up embracing a man like LaRouche with such enthusiasm.
Bevel's association with LaRouche didn't end after the '92 campaign. Perhaps most infamously, Bevel invited LaRouche to attend Louis Farrakhan's Million Man March in 1995. Farrakhan, it should be added, was another disturbingly close associate of Bevel's.
It was during Bevel's association with LaRouche that Bevel took it upon himself to publicize the so-called "Franklin Sex Abuse Scandal" in Nebraska. Though too complicated to get into here (this wikipedia entry will give you the basics but it doesn't even begin to get into just how elaborate and insane the hysteria and paranoia of this whole thing eventually got), the Franklin Case is one of the most spurrious hoaxes ever played on the conspiracy-minded folks of this country and it continues to twist minds and distort realities to this day.
During the Franklin Case, Bevel promoted himself as a crusader for "abused children" and essentially presented himself as someone battling against a conspiracy of child abusers and perverts. What make this especially ironic is that, while none of the people accused in the Franklin Case were ever convicted of sexually abusing a child, Bevel was.In 2007, Bevel was arrested and charged with sexually abusing his 13 year-old daughter. Though, not surprisingly, Bevel claimed to be the victim of a conspiracy, a jury of his peers disagreed and convicted him after three hours of diliberation.
Bevel was out on appeal when he died.
What can one say about such a life? Perhaps the only lesson that can learned from Jim Bevel is that a bad man who does a good deed remains, ultimately, a bad man.
Jim Bevel, R.I.P.
