DE Campus Life Editor

The Rev. James Luther Bevel came to campus Tuesday with a special message for SIUC students, but he had an important question to ask them first.

We all are owners of the Earth, he said. It’s our common property. The question is what is the contribution we’ll make to our property?

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We have a lot of things to do, and the people who primarily need to be involved are college students.

Bevel, a prominent strategist of the Civil Rights Movement, is someone who knows a lot about student activism. His background alone is enough to motivate students to become involved.

Bevel successfully organized student sit-ins to desegregate Nashville lunch counters and movie theaters in 1960. His work with the Freedom Rides helped integrate interstate bus travel in the following year. He co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee with Kwame Toure (formerly Stokely Carmichael) and worked diligently in his dangerous efforts to secure voting rights for African-Americans in Mississippi.

In 1963, Bevel devised the famous plan to march Birmingham’s public school children in support of the campaign to desegregate that city’s public accommodations and end hiring discrimination. He also helped to coordinate other similar strategies in the South in addition to conceiving the idea for the historic March on Washington.

Bevel later joined the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis when King was assassinated in 1968.

Thirty years later, Bevel is known as social philosopher and nonviolent scientist. He now works with a grassroots organization in Chicago and is affiliated with the Nation of Islam. Minister Louis Farrakhan credited Bevel with the idea of the Day of Atonement that led to the 1995 Million Man March.

Enoch Muhammad, coordinator of the SIUC student chapter of the Nation of Islam, said Bevel’s heroic civil rights struggles and determinism prompted him to invite Bevel to campus to speak.

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This man has been through wars that I never have been through, he said. Any man that would fight for a principle that will last until after he’s dead and gone, that’s integrity. He had us in mind.

I’m very thankful for people like him.

About 50 students, faculty and community members assembled in the Student Center’s Kaskaskia Room Tuesday night for Bevel’s speech. They were rewarded for their attendance with the opportunity to hear everything from Bevel’s civil rights struggle anecdotes to his present-day philosophical and scientific theories.

But his main message for SIUC students was about responsibility. Bevel said students are responsible for learning how the American government works because they have a duty to take care of the government, the courts, the businesses, the clinics, and the homes. He said those ideas, along with studying history and science, should be the entire focus of a college education.

Americans have to be scientists and citizens, he said. We own a nation. We come to school to perfect our citizenship. If you leave school and you’re not a scientist, not an historian, you’re not an American.

Bevel said this facet of education is important because students need to learn how to think critically and how to reach decisions scientifically, and for that they have to feed their minds.

Everything for man runs on his mind, but what happens when you don’t have a mind? You have an imagination and you call that a mind.

If you don’t leave school with a mind, how can you understand history? You can’t just have an opinion. You have to have the knowledge of what happened.

And since knowledge equals truth, Bevel said it is especially important to speak the truth.

Any lie into the mind turns into the imagination, he said. The truth is not going to do anything but make your mind wake up. When you stop lying, it’s going to make you deal with why.

But one of his most important messages for students was about the importance of sexual abstinence until marriage. He said indulging in sexual activities outside of marriage serves only to dull the mind. If the mind is dulled, then people are not able to fulfill their other obligations as American citizens and human beings especially without the sanctity of marriage.

What is the purpose of the reproductive organs? What kind of a person do you think you become when you lie and pretend those sexual organs are for any other purpose? You lose your ability to think and create.

Sisters have to stop being assistant masturbators and become scientific collaborators. They can do that through marriage.

Dedrick Gordon, a sophomore in mechanical engineering from Chicago, was very animated during Bevel’s discussion of these ideas. He said he enjoyed the discussion because Bevel brought a very spiritual and truthful message to campus.

Rev. Bevel brought an interesting perspective on how to solve the problems on this earth, he said. I think that his perspective opened many eyes and also made people understand that the problems of this world come from self.