By Joseph Williams | Word In Black
(WIB) – As a schoolboy growing up in northern Ohio, when a white boy called him the N-word, James Lawson reacted the way many Black people would have in that situation: he slapped the other child. His mother’s response to the incident, however, changed his life.
“What good did that do, Jimmy?” she asked.
That simple question set Rev. James Lawson Jr. on a path towards pacifism, using it as a tool that helped him change history. A close ally of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Lawson was the architect of King’s strategy of nonviolence — even in the face of white brutality — as a means to eradicate Jim Crow in the South. And he trained generations of civil rights titans, including Diane Nash and the late Rep. John Lewis.
Lawson, 95, died Tuesday in Los Angeles after a brief illness. He had spent years in Southern California as a teacher, activist, and community organizer. King once called Lawson “the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world.”
But The New York Times also described him as “a traveling troubleshooter in a land of night riders, where African Americans were beaten, shot, arrested and lynched.”
Lawson led pickets at segregated stores, organized protests at lunch counters, taught countless sessions on the principles of nonviolence, and led voter registration drives. All of which left him all too familiar with police nightsticks and jail cells.
While some in the Black community questioned whether passive resistance could defeat the violent intransigence of segregation, Lawson — who studied Mahatma Gandhi’s teachings while a young missionary in India — insisted the strategy was not only sound but powerful.
“It is only when the hostility comes to the surface that the people see the character of our nation,” he said. “Chances are that without people being hurt, we cannot solve the problem.”
James Morris Lawson Jr. was born September 28, 1922, and grew up in Massillon, Ohio, just south of Akron. The son and grandson of ministers, Lawson heard the call to ministry at a young age, and was ordained while still in high school.
A Methodist, Lawson attended Baldwin-Wallace College in Ohio in 1947, where he joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Congress of Racial Equality, both of which adhered to principles of passive resistance. In 1951, Lawson served 13 months of a three-year sentence for refusing to serve in the military during the Korean War.
As a divinity student at Ohio’s Oberlin College, having spent three years in India steeping himself in Gandhi’s independence movement, Lawson heard King deliver a lecture on campus about the Montgomery bus boycott in 1957, and the two met afterward. King urged him to come South immediately; Lawson agreed and enrolled in Vanderbilt University’s divinity school shortly afterward.
In Nashville, he taught nonviolence and organized protests; his students included Lewis, the future congressman, and Marion Barry, the future mayor of Washington. But he also practiced it on the street, using nonviolent protests to desegregate lunch counters and movie theaters in Music City.
Although Lawson’s accomplishments range from co-founding the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to organizing anti-war and anti-poverty protests, his beliefs were profoundly challenged in April 1968. That’s when Lawson organized striking sanitation workers in Memphis — a fateful protest that drew King to the city for the last speech of his life.
Lawson told the Associated Press that King’s assassination on April 4 paralyzed and saddened him.
“I thought I would not live beyond 40, myself,” Lawson said. “The imminence of death was a part of the discipline we lived with, but no one as much as King.”
Yet King’s assassination did not shake the reverend’s commitment to nonviolence. Indeed, he ministered to James Earl Ray, King’s convicted assassin, while Ray was in prison, including officiating over the inmate’s marriage and attending his funeral.
In the 1970s and 1980s, Lawson led churches in Memphis and Shelbyville, Tennessee, before moving to Los Angeles, where he led the Holman United Methodist Church and taught at California State University, Northridge, and the University of California, Los Angeles. He and his wife, Dorothy Wood Lawson, raised three sons.
In a statement, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said her city is in mourning for “a civil rights leader whose critical leadership, teachings, and mentorship confronted and crippled centuries of systemic oppression, racism and injustice.”