The Rev. James Lawson Jr., a preacher of nonviolent protest who led activists to withstand brutal responses from white authorities as the civil rights movement gained momentum, has died at the age of 95, his family announced Monday.
Lawson died Sunday after a short illness in Los Angeles, where he had worked for decades as a pastor, labor activist and college professor, according to his family.
Lawson was a close aide to the Rev. Martin Luther King, who called him “the world’s foremost theorist and strategist of nonviolence.”
Lawson met King in 1957 after spending three years in India absorbing information about Mohandas K. Gandhi’s independence movement. King visited India himself two years later, but at the time had only read about Gandhi.
The two black pastors, both 28 years old, quickly hit it off through their enthusiasm for the Indian leader’s ideas, and King urged Lawson to implement them in the American South.
Lawson was soon hosting workshops in a church basement in Nashville, Tennessee, preparing people like John Lewis, Diane Nash, Bernard Lafayette, Marion Barry, the Freedom Riders, and many others to peacefully resist the vicious responses to their challenges to racist laws and policies.
Lawson’s lessons led Nashville to become the first major city in the South to desegregate its downtown on May 10, 1960, after hundreds of students organized lunch counter sit-ins and boycotted segregating stores.
Lawson’s greatest contribution was to introduce Gandhian principles to people familiar with Biblical teachings and show how direct action could expose the immorality and weakness of racist white power structures.
“We as people have the power to resist racism in our own lives and in our own hearts,” Gandhi said, Lawson told The Associated Press. “We have the power to choose, we have the power to say no to wrongs. That’s what Jesus taught, too.”
It was Lawson who organized the sanitation workers’ strike that fatefully drew King to Memphis a few years later in 1968. Lawson said he was initially shaken by King’s assassination and will forever be saddened by it.
“I myself didn’t think I would live past 40,” Lawson said. “The imminence of death was part of the discipline by which we lived, but no one felt it more than King.”
Nevertheless, Lawson made it his life’s mission to preach the power of nonviolent direct action.
“I still feel anxious and frustrated,” said Lawson, who took part in a demonstration in Memphis marking the 50th anniversary of King’s death. “The challenges are not over.”
James Morris Lawson Jr. was born on Sept. 22, 1928, the son and grandson of a pastor, grew up in Massillon, Ohio, and was ordained during his senior year of high school.
He told The Tennessean that his commitment to nonviolence began when, as an elementary school student, he confided in his mother that he had slapped a boy who had used a racial slur against him.
“What good was that, Jimmy?” his mother asked.
That simple question changed his life forever, Lawson says. He became a pacifist, refused to be drafted into the Korean War, and spent a year in prison as a conscientious objector. After earning a degree in sociology, the pacifist group Friends of Reconciliation sponsored a trip to India.
Though Gandhi had already been assassinated by then, Lawson met with those who had worked with Gandhi and explained Gandhi’s concept of “satyagraha” – the relentless pursuit of truth – that inspired Indians to peacefully reject British rule. Lawson then saw how the Christian concept of turning the other cheek could be applied to collective action to challenge morally indefensible laws.
Lawson was studying theology at Oberlin College in Ohio when King spoke on campus about the Montgomery bus boycott, and recalled in an interview with The Associated Press that King told him, “We can’t wait. We have to come South now.”
Lawson soon enrolled in theology classes at Vanderbilt University, where he led young activists in mock protests, practicing how to take insults without reacting to them.
The technique quickly proved its effectiveness at Nashville’s lunch counters and movie theaters, and on May 10, 1960, the businesses agreed to remove their “No Colors Allowed” signs that enforced white supremacy.
“This was the first big successful movement to remove the signs,” Lawson said, adding that it set the template for the sit-ins that began to spread across the South.
Lawson was called upon to organize what would become the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which sought to organize the spontaneous efforts of tens of thousands of students who began to challenge Jim Crow laws across the South.
Angry racists expelled Lawson from Vanderbilt, but he said he never bore any ill will toward the school, returned as a distinguished visiting professor in 2006 and eventually donated most of his papers.
Lawson earned a theology degree from Boston University and became a Methodist minister in Memphis, where his wife, Dorothy Wood Lawson, worked as an organizer for the NAACP. A few years later they moved to Los Angeles, where Lawson led the Holman United Methodist Church and taught at California State University, Northridge, and the University of California. They raised three sons, John, Morris, and Seth.
Lawson continued her activism well into her 90s, encouraging younger generations to harness their power: At a tribute to the late Rep. John Lewis last year, she recalled how the young people she led in Nashville turned a lonely march into a mass movement that paved the way for the passage of the Civil Rights Act.
“As we honor and celebrate the life of John Lewis, let us rededicate our souls, our hearts, our minds, our bodies and our strength to the ongoing journey to defeat the injustices that permeate our midst,” Lawson said.
