James became an ordained preacher (influenced by his father, who was a religious man), and Lafayette III attended American Baptist College.

[2] As a young man at the age of twenty, Lafayette moved to Nashville, Tennessee, and enrolled in the American Baptist Theological Seminary.

In 1961, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) initiated a movement to enforce federal integration laws on interstate bus routes.

After the Freedom Riders were violently attacked in the city of Anniston, Alabama, the Nashville Student Movement, of which Lafayette was a member, vowed to take over the journey.

In May 1961, in the city of Montgomery, Alabama, Lafayette and the other riders were "greeted" at the bus terminal by an angry white mob, members of Ku Klux Klan chapters, and were viciously attacked.

Their attackers carried every makeshift weapon imaginable: baseball bats, wooden boards, bricks, chains, tire irons, pipes, and even garden tools.

[5] During the Montgomery attack, Lafayette stood firm; his fellow riders William Barbee and John Lewis were beaten until they fell unconscious.

Lafayette, Fred Leonard and Allen Cason narrowly escaped being killed by jumping over a wall and running to the post office.

Lafayette with other Riders was arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, and jailed at Parchman State Prison Farm during June 1961.

[1] In late 1964, the board of Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) decided to join the ongoing Alabama Project organized by James Bevel, Diane Nash, and James Orange, and chose Selma as the focal point to gain voting rights for African Americans.

In early 1965, Lafayette, Bevel, Martin Luther King Jr., Orange, Nash and others organized a series of public demonstrations that finally, with the march from Selma-to-Montgomery initiated by Bevel, put enough pressure on the federal government to take action and gave enough support to President Lyndon Johnson for Johnson to demand the drafting and passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

[11] In 1973, Lafayette was named first director of the Peace Education Program at Gustavus Adolphus College, Saint Peter, Minnesota.

The Center promotes nonviolence education using a curriculum based on the principles and methods of Martin Luther King Jr.[16] He is a Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at the Candler School of Theology, at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

In 2014, The University of Rhode Island honored LaFayette with an honorary doctorate in recognition of his lifetime nonviolence leadership for civil and human rights.