James M. Lawson Jr., a Methodist minister who later served as the civil rights leader and taught hundreds of young people to use violent techniques in protest of the 1960s ‘ racial inequality, passed away. He was 95.
Lawson, who for centuries worked as a priest, labor movement administrator and school teacher, died Sunday of respiratory arrest en route to a Los Angeles hospital, his brother J. Morris Lawson III told The Washington Post. He was 95.
Recruited by the Rev. In Nashville and other hotspots of the movement, Martin Luther King Jr. and Lawson organized and led regular workshops on violent action. Among the attendees were Rep. John Lewis, who will become the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s potential leaders.
” I really felt … that he was God- sent”, Lewis when wrote of Lawson. ” There was something of a mysterious about him, something divine, but gathered, about his way. …The person was a born professor, in the truest sense of the word”.
Called” the leading violence theory” by King, Lawson had studied Gandhi’s theory in India before joining the fight in the South. He organized courses throughout the area and served as a traveling troubleshooter for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
In 1968, he invited King to speak to dazzling sanitation workers in Memphis, where the charismatic priest, who had anticipated his own dying,  , was assassinated.
Lawson worked with numerous legal rights groups in the South until 1974, when , he moved to L. A.  , to get priest of Holman United Methodist Church. He led the chapel for 25 times. He left in 1999, but he remained a proponent of social justice and peace.
James M. Lawson Jr., the child of a happy Black pastor, did not generally practice violence. In Ohio in the 1930s, he smacked a pale boy for yelling a racist epithet.
Fortunately for Lawson, there were no implications — until he got house.
” Jimmy”, his mother said when he told her what he had done, “what good did that do? There must be a more effective solution.
Busy in the kitchen, she did not look at him when she delivered her rebuke, but her thoughts resonated. Lawson felt his world” only form of stopped”, he afterwards recalled. ” And somewhere in the middle of my soul did I hear myself saying,” I may discover that better way.”
His research led him to India, where he studied Mohandas K. Gandhi’s ideas about violent weight. He incorporated Gandhi’s rules with scriptural insight to become what the Rev. Gandhi was after returning to the United States, using what he had learned to help the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King Jr. may contact” the leading violence theory” of the time.
Lawson was a key player in some of the movement’s most significant efforts, including the first Liberty Ride and the sit-ins for the Nashville breakfast shop in Los Angeles.
The Montgomery bus boycott King, which it was launched in 1955, demonstrated the potency of violent opposition. However, Lawson was the one to discipline the young protesters and move the civil rights movement to the next level. He taught them important strategies, including how to survive taunts and physical assaults, how to avoid breaking wandering laws, and “even how to dress” for a sit-in, according to historian Taylor Branch, which meant” boots and heels for the women, coats and ties for the fellows.”
Many of the figures who would help the activity in the 1960s, including Lewis, who was one of the committee’s organizers, were nurtured in his nonviolence workshops.
” I could n’t have found a better teacher than Jim Lawson”, Lewis wrote in his 1999 memoir. ” It is not hard to find forgiveness. And this is at the heart of the violent way of life, as Jim Lawson taught us.
Born Sept. 22, 1928, in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, James Morris Lawson Jr. grew up in Massillon, Ohio, the brother of a Reggae- born tailor and an itinerant Methodist secretary who packed a weapon when he traveled in the South. His parents “believed that I should fight to defend myself”, Lawson, the fifth of nine children, recalled in a 2000 meeting with National Public Radio.
When he staged his second sit-in against a Massillon cafe that lacked Black food, he was in high school in the 1940s. The landlord gave him a meal but said he would never return.
After high school he attended Baldwin- Wallace College, a Methodist school in Berea, Ohio, and joined the pragmatist Brotherhood of Reconciliation. He refused the document and was imprisoned for 14 times during the Korean War when he was called to martial service.
Lawson dedicated himself to studying Gandhian violence in 1953 when he left a Methodist vision to India. When he read a news article about the Montgomery bus boycott, he was still in India in soon 1955. ” I saw that as an answer to a prayer”, Lawson, in a 1984 Los Angeles Times meeting, said of the opposition, led by King. ” It was my response to begin yelling joy.”
He returned to the U. S. in 1956 and enrolled in the Graduate School of Theology at Oberlin College, where he met King in 1957. King, who had come to Oberlin to talk, urged Lawson to join the movement.
In 1958 Lawson moved to Nashville and enrolled in Vanderbilt University’s god system. He also became a member of the Nashville Christian Leadership Council and began conducting nonviolent seminars.
Lawson frequently asked students to make racial insults to others to help them learn self-control and used role-playing greatly. He explained how to organize a sit-in by filling the meal shop seats during shifts. He even showed them ways to reduce accidents by keeping eye contact with their attackers and using their body to spread the blows that were certain to hit them.
In November 1959, Lawson’s individuals staged three process stay- openings. ” We really did it quietly”, without media coverage, he told the Times in 2014. ” We called them portion of our finding method”.
He cut short the training time after pupils in Greensboro, North Carolina, received nationwide media interest with a series of impromptu remain- ins that began on Feb. 1, 1960. A few weeks after, the Nashville students — a “nonviolent troops” about 500 powerful, drawn from Fisk University and other nearby colleges— leaped into motion, occupying three downtown Nashville lunch counters. Over the next three months, more establishments were targeted, including bus terminals and major department stores.
According to Lawson, “it was obvious that we had a very disciplined movement with students as our main focus.”
When 81 students were attacked by a group of whites and subsequently arrested, Lawson was expelled from Vanderbilt. Faculty members resigned in protest, generating headlines across the country.
The home of an attorney representing the jailed protesters was bombed, causing a nationwide march to Nashville City Hall and a white-owned business boycott. Three weeks after the mayor made an appeal to white citizens to end racism, Nashville lunch counters started serving Black people and sit-in campaigns soon spread to dozens of other Southern cities.
Lawson believed that sit- ins were more effective than lawsuits, which he criticized in a 1960 speech at Shaw University in North Carolina as “middle- class conventional, halfway efforts” to deal with grave social injustice.
Longtime activist , Julian Bond , recalled in” Voices of Freedom”, an oral history of the movement, that Lawson sounded “like the bad younger brother pushing King to do more, to be more militant” and had” a much more ambitious idea of what nonviolence could do”.
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was established the day after Lawson’s speech with a statement of purpose created by Lawson. Initially led by Marion Barry, the future mayor of Washington, SNCC helped drive major civil rights campaigns, including voter registration projects and the 1961 Freedom Rides.
When the first Freedom Ride was derailed by mob violence, a small group of Nashville students trained by Lawson completed the dangerous bus trip from Montgomery, Alabama, to Jackson, Mississippi. After some of the protesters entered the whites-only restrooms at the Jackson terminal, Lawson accompanied them and was taken into custody along with other Freedom Riders in Mississippi. At Lawson’s urging, they refused bail, which impelled hundreds of other students to join the crusade against segregated interstate travel.
Lawson became the Memphis-based Centenary United Methodist Church in 1962. He left for L. A. in 1974 when he was hired to lead Holman United Methodist Church.
Over the next 25 years, until his retirement in 1999, he remained a prominent activist. He was co- chair of the Gathering, a group of 200 South Los Angeles clergymen who protested the Los Angeles police shooting of , Eula Love , in 1979, and headed the Los Angeles chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was detained several times during demonstrations, including one in which he protested U.S. military aid to El Salvador in the late 1980s. In 2000 he risked a church trial for blessing a lesbian wedding.
At a memorial service at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta after Lewis ‘ death in 2020, Lawson, 91, paid tribute to the congressman along with three other former U.S. presidents. He exhorted Americans to “practice the politics of the preamble of the Constitution” as the “only way” to honor Lewis ‘ life in an eloquent eulogy bookended by the poetry of Czeslaw Milosz and Langston Hughes.
He claimed that he had no regrets about the fateful invitation King received in 1968 to address the rioting sanitation workers in Memphis. King was assassinated there a day after giving his famous” Mountaintop” speech, in which he spoke of his dream of equality and added,” I may not get there with you”.
” Martin expected his death”, Lawson told the Times in 2004. He had known since Montgomery that he could be shot down at any time, but I do n’t know if he specifically anticipated it on that day.
Wondering what kind of person would commit such a crime, Lawson began visiting the convicted killer, James Earl Ray, in prison. He began to accept that Ray was innocent, just like members of the King family, and he unsuccessfully pushed for a new trial. Ray asked Lawson to lead the prison ceremony when he made the decision to marry a sketch artist who had covered his arraignment.
Years later, Lawson told historian John Egerton,” It was not just that I doubted his guilt, it went far beyond that.” ” I was aware that if Martin were still alive and in my position, he would have married them, even if he had been aware that Ray was guilty.” As one of my sons said to me,’ If you believe all that stuff you’ve been preaching, you’ll do it.’
” He was right, of course.”
Lawson is survived by his wife, Dorothy Wood, and two sons, J. Morris Lawson III and John Lawson, a brother, Phillip, and three grandchildren. His son C. Seth Lawson died in 2019.
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