Rev. James Lawson, a civil rights pioneer, died earlier this month. Although not well-known to the broader public, Lawson significantly influenced generations of civil rights, labor, and peace activists. His work with civil rights activists was pivotal, as he taught many of the young activists who became leaders of the Civil Rights Movement.
Born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, in 1928, Lawson was the son and grandson of Methodist pastors. Not surprisingly, he became a minister right after high school.
As he was finishing his bachelor’s degree at Baldwin Wallace College, Lawson, a pacifist, was imprisoned for 13 months for refusing to register for the draft. Following his parole in 1952, he went to India as a missionary for the Methodist church.
Lawson was introduced to Gandhi’s nonviolent philosophy when he joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation, America’s oldest pacifist organization. In India for three years, he immersed himself in Gandhi’s philosophy, studying Gandhi’s use of nonviolence to achieve social and political change.
Lawson returned to the United States in 1956 and entered the school of theology at Oberlin College. In 1957, he met Martin Luther King when King came to Oberlin to speak. The two men discussed their mutual commitment to nonviolence.
Lawson mentioned his previous thoughts about going to the South and espousing nonviolence. King strongly suggested that Lawson should come South and do so soon, as no one like him was working down there. This meant that they did not have Black men and Black clergypersons with nonviolent backgrounds like Lawson’s. Lawson told King that he would do so as soon as he could.
A note here about nonviolence and the South: during and right after the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, many Northerners assumed that nonviolence was the natural state of African Americans in the South, thus making King’s push for nonviolence readily acceptable. Of course, that was not the case. Southern Blacks had to be convinced about the nonviolent tactic, and Rev. Lawson was the principal figure teaching people, especially the leaders, about the morality and usefulness of nonviolence.
The following year, after meeting King, Lawson moved south to Nashville. The Fellowship of Reconciliation appointed him as a field secretary, where his main task was to travel around the South and give workshops on nonviolence for social change.
In 1959, Lawson enrolled as a divinity student at Vanderbilt University. While there, he also organized workshops on nonviolence in church basements for community members, Vanderbilt students, and students at the city’s four Black colleges. Lawson believed that a nonviolent movement would end segregation. He taught that this effort would require physical courage, unshakable conviction, and a willingness to forgive those who beat them.
Lawson was a master strategist and careful planner. Small groups of Black and White students engaged in role-playing exercises in his workshops. Some played angry White racists pounding on protesters while calling them racist epithets. He taught them to withstand the taunts, slurs, and blows of the segregationists and to protect themselves without retaliating.
Significantly, some of Lawson’s proteges—including Diane Nash, Marion Berry, John Lewis, James Bevel, and Bernard Lafayette—became leaders in the movement.
When the famous first sit-in occurred in Greensboro, North Carolina, in February 1960, students in Nashville wanted to follow suit immediately. After Lawson’s crash course in nonviolence, hundreds of these students held a massive sit-in in downtown Nashville the next day. These students received brutal treatment by the police, who arrested more than 150 students.
Lawson helped organize Nashville’s Black community, which was outraged by the students’ treatment. Sit-ins grew and intensified, and downtown businesses suffered, causing business leaders to pressure the mayor and city council to resolve the controversy.
In a march to city hall, Diane Nash famously asked the mayor if he felt discrimination against people of color was wrong. His answer was yes, beginning the desegregation of the city’s lunch counters.
Two months later, after hundreds of student sit-ins across the country, the young leaders in Nashville were vital participants in the formation of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee). Lawson was the keynote speaker, spurring the organization to use nonviolence as a tactic.
Martin Luther King called Lawson “the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world.”
