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THE REV. JAMES M. LAWSON JR., 1928–2024  
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Peter Dreier
June 13, 2024
The Nation
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_ The “greatest teacher of nonviolence in America” was a mentor
to generations of activists, from Martin Luther King Jr. to today’s
union organizers and immigrant rights campaigners. _

Rev. James Lawson, (Photo: Vanderbilt University)

 

The Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., whom Martin Luther King called “the
greatest teacher of nonviolence in America,” died on June 9 in Los
Angeles at 95.

Although not well-known to the wider public, Lawson had a significant
influence on generations of civil rights, labor, and peace activists.

Lawson was raised in Massillon, Ohio. His father was a strong-willed
Methodist preacher, who packed a pistol in his belt and taught his
son, the sixth of nine children, to fight for himself even if the odds
were against him. Lawson’s mother, an immigrant from Jamaica, took a
different approach. As a fourth grader, he proudly told his mother
that he slapped a white boy across the face after he called him a
“nigger.” She admonished him, urging him always to be guided by
love. The moment, he later reflected, was a “sanctification,” an
epiphany that there was a better way to live.

At Baldwin-Wallace College, Lawson met A. J. Muste
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the pacifist leader of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) spoke on
campus, and he immediately joined FOR’s local chapter.

In the spring of his senior year, Lawson received a draft notice. He
had decided to pursue the ministry and could have received a
deferment, but he thought it was unconscionable for clergy to be
deferred while others had to serve in the Korean War. He ended up
serving 13 months in prison.

After his release, Lawson moved to Nagpur, India, where he worked for
three years as a Methodist missionary and
studied _satyagraha_—Mohandas Gandhi’s principles of nonviolent
resistance.

One day in 1955, while in India, Lawson was reading a newspaper and
saw photographs of masses of African Americans launching a bus boycott
in Montgomery, Alabama. He began whooping, clapping, and dancing in
joy. This shocked a colleague in the next hut, who only knew Lawson as
a serious and cerebral man. But for Lawson, the photographs offered
evidence that a nonviolent mass movement was taking hold back home.

He returned to the United States and began working on his master’s
degree in theology at Oberlin College. But in 1957, Martin
Luther King came to Oberlin
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speak, and the two men made an instant connection. King urged Lawson
to come immediately to the South. In 1958, Muste appointed Lawson the
FOR’s Southern field secretary, allowing him to move to Nashville
and travel throughout the South conducting workshops in nonviolence
for small groups of Black teenagers, college students, and adults,
many of them cosponsored with King’s Southern Christian Leadership
Conference.

In 1959 Lawson enrolled as a divinity student at Vanderbilt University
and began holding workshops
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a church basement for students from Vanderbilt and four local Black
colleges: Fisk University, American Baptist College, Meharry Medical
College, and Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State University.

Lawson believed that only a nonviolent movement, led by young people,
would end segregation. It would require physical courage, unshakable
conviction—and a willingness to forgive those who would beat them.

Lawson was a master strategist and careful planner. In his workshops,
small groups of students, Black and white, engaged in role-playing
exercises. Some played angry white racists pounding on protesters
while calling them racist epithets. Lawson taught them to withstand
the taunts, slurs, and blows of the segregationists and to protect
themselves without retaliating.

Many of Lawson’s protégés—including John Lewis
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leaders.

In February 1960, inspired by the initial sit-in in Greensboro, North
Carolina, a few days earlier, students crammed into Nashville’s
First Baptist Church, eager to join the crusade. They wanted to stage
a local sit-in the next day. Worried that without training, their
action would be a disaster, Lawson led a crash course in nonviolence
that lasted well into the night.

The next morning, about 500 activists went to Nashville’s downtown
stores, requesting to be served. They dressed impeccably and carried
books to read. One group of students sat at a counter, were knocked
down, beaten, and arrested. Then another group took their place, and
the pattern was repeated.

More than 150 students were arrested. A lead editorial in
the _Nashville Banner_, one of the city’s two daily newspapers,
quoted Lawson as urging students to “violate the law,” which the
paper called
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to anarchy.”

Lawson helped organize Nashville’s Black community, outraged by the
arrests and the brutal treatment of the student protesters, to boycott
downtown stores. Many whites also stayed away, some out of sympathy,
others out of fear. Business leaders pressured the mayor and city
council to resolve the controversy. The next month, Nashville’s
lunch counters began to serve African Americans
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In April 1960, Lawson delivered the keynote speech at the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s founding meeting
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sit-ins, Lawson told the assembled activists, represented a
“judgment upon middle-class conventional halfway efforts to deal
with radical social evil.”

Amid the growing sit-ins, and under pressure from Vanderbilt’s board
members, the dean of the Divinity School asked Lawson to withdraw.
Lawson refused, and the board expelled him
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But the university got more than it bargained for. Lawson’s
expulsion, reported on the front page of _The New York Times_,
motivated 10 Divinity School professors, including the dean, to resign
in protest, forcing the school to eventually offer Lawson a
reinstatement. He opted instead to complete his degree at Boston
University.

In 1961, after the first wave of Freedom Riders were met with mob
violence, including the fire-bombing
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Alabama, some activists thought the project should be halted. The
Nashville students called Lawson, who endorsed the students’ plan to
send a new wave of Freedom Riders to Alabama to continue the campaign.
Lawson told the students he would join them.

 
The Rev. James Lawson leading a workshop on nonviolence.  (Photo:
Donald Uhrbrock  /  The Nation)
On May 24, graduates from Lawson’s workshops joined other activists
aboard a Trailways bus from Montgomery, Alabama, to Jackson,
Mississippi. Despite warnings of bomb threats along the way, the
riders arrived safely in Jackson and, upon exiting the bus, filed into
the “whites only” waiting room. They were promptly arrested.

Two days later, Lawson and the other arrested riders appeared in
court. The judge, an extreme segregationist, found all 27 defendants
guilty
[///C:/Users/Peter%2520Dreier/Downloads/MISSISSIPPI_COURT_FINES_27_FOR.pdf?utm_source=xxxxxx-general&utm_medium=email],
sentencing each to pay a $200 fine. He wanted them out of Mississippi
and the national media spotlight. But many of them refused to pay
their fines and instead served sentences in Mississippi’s notorious
Parchman Prison, where some were beaten by the guards. In the
meantime, hundreds of other Freedom Riders had joined the crusade,
drawing worldwide attention that heightened the unease within the
Kennedy administration.

In June, a delegation of Freedom Riders and their supporters,
including Lawson, met with Attorney General Robert Kennedy at the
Justice Department in Washington, DC. After that meeting, Kennedy
pressured the federal Interstate Commerce Commission to issue new
policies desegregating bus travel. That September, the commission
announced new rules whereby passengers would be permitted to sit
wherever they pleased on interstate buses and trains, “white” and
“colored” signs would come down in the terminals, and bus station
lunch counters would have to serve people regardless of race.

On February 12, 1968 in Memphis, 1,300 Black sanitation workers
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dangerous conditions for pitiful wages and no benefits—went on
strike after two workers were killed when a truck malfunctioned. They
demanded a pay raise, overtime pay, merit promotions without regard to
race, and city recognition of AFSCME as their union bargaining agent.
For the next several months, city officials refused to negotiate.

Lawson, by then pastor of Memphis’s Centenary United Methodist
Church, mobilized community support
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the striking workers, including protest rallies, demonstrations, and a
sit-in at City Hall.

The Memphis police attacked the union members, ministers, and others
indiscriminately, often using clubs and mace. While Lawson counseled
nonviolence, the police were clearly trying to provoke the protesters,
even arresting some of them for jaywalking.

Lawson persuaded King to come to Memphis
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strikers and to generate national attention for the walkout. King’s
last speech was given at the Mason Temple, the day before he was
murdered as he stood on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel.

After President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered federal troops to Memphis,
the Memphis City Council passed a resolution recognizing the union.
The strikers won a 14-month contract that included union dues
check-off, a grievance procedure, and wage increases.

In 1974, Lawson left the South to become pastor at the 2,700-member
Holman Methodist Church in Los Angeles. There he became involved with
the labor movement, the American Civil Liberties Union, and movements
for reproductive choice, immigrant rights, and LGBTQ rights. He served
as chairman of LA’s Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, as
national chair of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and as host
of _Lawson Live_, a weekly cable television and call-in radio show,
where he discussed social justice issues.

Soon after arriving in LA, he started offering monthly workshops on
nonviolence for members of his congregation and others engaged in
social justice work. Lawson retired from Holman in 1999, but continued
to teach the Saturday morning workshops until a few months ago,
inspiring a new generation
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organizers and progressive politicians..

Maria Elena Durazo, who had led a rebellion against the old guard at
the hotel workers union and was elected president of UNITE HERE Local
11, was one of many activists whoattended Lawson’s workshops.

“We needed his guidance and he was always there for us,” said
Durazo, who later became the first woman head of the LA County
Federation of Labor and is now a California state senator. She invited
Lawson to meet with Local 11’s mostly immigrant Latina hotel and
food workers. He helped them win higher wages and improved working
conditions by orchestrating nonviolent sit-ins, hunger strikes and
civil disobedience protests.

“His contribution wasn’t just to the labor movement but to the
wider progressive movement,” Durazo said.

As a young labor lawyer, Kent Wong also attended Lawson’s workshops.
After he became director of UCLA’s Labor Center, he co-taught a
course with Lawson on nonviolence for 22 years that, Wong said, “has
helped recruit and train students and young people to advance our
movement for social change.”

Ju Hong met Lawson in 2011 as a young immigrant rights activist. “I
remember his teachings on the power of organizing, advocacy, and
nonviolent direct actions,” said Hong, who is now director of
UCLA’s Dream Resource Center, which trains immigrant rights
organizers. “Those are lessons you never forget.”

In 1989, Lawson was one of three dozen people arrested at the Federal
Building in downtown Los Angeles while protesting US support for the
government of El Salvador. In 1997, he led protest rallies to push the
Los Angeles City Council to approve a “living wage” ordinance to
raise wages for low-wage workers. The next year, he marched onto the
University of Southern California campus in support of unionized food
service and facilities workers. When LA’s garbage workers were
organizing a union drive, Lawson connected them with several of the
Memphis sanitation workers from the 1968 strike.

He took part in a 2003 Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride to mobilize
public support to immigration reform and challenge the widespread
immigrant-bashing that occurred in the wake of 9/11.

“No human being in the sight of God is illegal,” Lawson declared
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one rally. “The fight for the civil rights of workers who come here
from all over the world is the same as the Freedom Rides of 1961 and
the continuing struggle for civil and human rights for all.”

In 2005, Vanderbilt University bestowed Lawson with its Distinguished
Alumnus award, then invited him to teach as a distinguished visiting
professor for three years, and named an endowed professorship and
an institute
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nonviolence in his honor.

“No other alumnus has ever contributed so much to issues of national
and international justice and peace, and the promotion of a nonviolent
world view,” said Chancellor Gordon Gee
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45 years after the university had expelled Lawson for leading civil
rights protests. In 2021, Durazo and Wong led the successful effort to
name UCLA’s downtown labor center the James Lawson Jr. Worker
Justice Center
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_[PETER DREIER teaches politics at Occidental College and is author of
several books including Baseball Rebels: The Players, People, and
Social Movements That Shook Up the Game and Changed America, published
in April, 2022.]_

_Copyright c 2024 The Nation. Reprinted with permission. May not be
reprinted without permission
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Distributed by PARS International Corp
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_Please support progressive journalism. Get a digital subscription
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* James Lawson
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* Rev. James M. Lawson
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* Martin Luther King
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* MLK
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* civil rights movement
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* Nonviolence
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* 1960s
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* Protest
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* social protest
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* Social Movements
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* Labor Movement
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* peace movement
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* SNCC
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* SCLC
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* student nonviolent coordinating committee
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* South
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* sit-in
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* Freedom Riders
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* Freedom Rides
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* immigrant rights
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