A Father's Shadow

Two years later, as Bevel and his first wife, Diane Nash, fought to register black voters in Alabama, King again held back, unsure if the time was right to confront Gov. George Wallace. But after a black man named Jimmie Lee Jackson was shot by police in Marion and left to die, Bevel was too enraged to listen to King's words of caution.

"He wanted to do something dramatic," Branch says. Bevel wanted to lead a march from Selma, near where Jackson was killed, to Montgomery, the state capital, about 50 miles away, then dump Jackson's body in Wallace's office.

King eventually agreed to a march from Selma to Montgomery, a walk that would wind through some of Alabama's most racist territory and end at the capitol building. Even after King granted permission, he continued to plead with Bevel to wait, Branch says. Bevel pushed ahead anyway. But before the marchers could leave Selma, they were confronted by state troopers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge and beaten in a now famous scene that again stunned much of the country. The ensuing outrage led to two more Selma-Montgomery marches and to the passage of the landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, outlawing the discriminatory practices that had disenfranchised black voters.

And yet as vital as Birmingham and Selma were to the movement and as significant a role as Bevel played in making these events

happen, his behavior worried some of his colleagues, says Andrew Young, a King lieu-tenant who later became mayor of Atlanta. They feared that Bevel was unstable.

Young recalls Bevel approaching him not long after the first Selma march with a strange story. Bevel said he had been doing laundry one night when Jesus suddenly appeared, sat down on the washing machine and told the young preacher that he needed to help stop the Vietnam War. "There is no doubt he marched to the tune of a different drummer," Young says.

King didn't always know what to make of Bevel, Young says, but he valued Bevel's fearlessness and creativity in the struggle for equal rights. "Dr. King used to say we were all maladjusted," Young says, with a laugh. "He said you had to be maladjusted to take on the whole social order as it was." Bevel remained a prominent leader in the movement until King's murder in 1968. He was standing in the parking lot, just below the second-floor balcony of Memphis's Lorraine Motel, when King was shot.

In the assassination's chaotic aftermath, Bevel's behavior grew more erratic. To the consternation of civil rights leaders, he took up the case of King's admitted killer, James Earl Ray, going as far as to visit Ray in jail and proclaim his innocence. He called for Ray to be given a trial even though Ray had already pleaded guilty. Two years later, according to Halberstam's book, Bevel went on a nonstop, three-day preaching binge that ended with Young taking him to the psychiatric ward of an Atlanta hospital. Within days, Bevel was pushed out of King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Out of the hospital and gone from the movement, he moved around the country, trailed by followers who lived together in what his children describe as communes. He worked for a time with the Unification Church's Rev. Sun Myung Moon, ran unsuccessfully for Congress as a Republican in Illinois and, in 1992, was the running mate of perennial fringe presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche Jr. In 1995, Bevel collaborated with Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan on what became the Million Man March in Washington.

Throughout the odd twists and turns of his career, Bevel advocated a philosophy built on what he describes as six "institutions" -- church, government, business, clinic, home, school -- that Aaralyn says he discovered by "decoding" the Lord's Prayer. He lists them constantly for people, connecting the words with a big figure eight. They are the basis for almost all of his current teachings, including his beliefs about the "science" of sex and marriage. He preaches that there is a distinction between what he calls "romantic love" and "constitutional intimacy." The latter is the desired state in which sex is used for procreation and not pleasure. Anything else is "a pimp-whore" relationship. Fathers, he maintains, are the best ones to train or "sexually orientate" their daughters.

When asked about his older brother, Charles Bevel, an actor and musician who lives in New Jersey, stumbles for a moment, trying to find the right words. He has so many thoughts on the subject, he says, that he typed them into a computer a few years ago and the document rolled on for 30 single-spaced pages. He says his emotions about his brother "have roller-coastered from peaks of anger towards his arrogance to valleys of pity and compassion for his weakness and illness." He traces the problem to their childhood in Itta Bena, Miss., where they were two of 17 children born to a mother who left them bewildered sexually. Raped by her stepfather at age 13, she flew into rages at the mention of anything sexual. Once, Charles remembers, she beat their 2-year-old brother so violently with a leather strap when the child appeared to be rubbing himself against a chair that she drew blood.

Charles is convinced that the root of his brother's problems lies with their mother. Never fully able to grasp her visceral reactions to sex, James threw himself into sexual trysts with grown women when he was only 12 or 13, his brother says. "There are no emotional underpinnings with his relationships," Charles says. Then again, there were few emotional underpinnings in their entire family, which Charles noticed as he grew into his teens and saw how other families hugged, spent time together and seemed connected to one another. This was not the case for the Bevels. Their father was a sharecropper with a philosophical bent who was more interested in ideas than people; their mother was a woman who beat the slightest impure thought from their minds. James, it seemed to Charles, took something from each of them.