LOS ANGELES — The Rev. James Lawson Jr., an apostle of nonviolent protest who taught activists to resist the brutal responses of white authorities as the Civil Rights Movement gained ground, has died, his family said Monday. He was 95.
His family said Lawson died Sunday after a brief illness in Los Angeles, where he worked for decades as a pastor, union organizer and college professor.
Lawson was a close advisor to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who called him “the world’s leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence.”
Lawson met King in 1957, after spending three years in India learning about Mohandas K. Gandhi’s independence movement. King himself would travel to India two years later, but at the time he had only read about Gandhi in books.
The two black preachers – both 28 years old – quickly bonded over their enthusiasm for the Indian leader’s ideas, and King urged Lawson to put them into practice in the American South.
Lawson was soon leading workshops in church basements in Nashville, Tennesseewho prepared John Lewis, Diane Nash, Bernard Lafayette, Marion Barry, the Freedom Riders, and many others to peacefully resist brutal responses to their challenges to racist laws and policies.
Lawson’s lessons led to Nashville becoming the first major city in the South to desegregate its downtown on May 10, 1960, after hundreds of well-organized students staged lunch counter sit-ins and boycotted discriminatory businesses.
Lawson’s particular contribution was to introduce Gandhian principles to people more familiar with Biblical teachings, and showed how direct action could expose the immorality and fragility of racist white power structures.
Gandhi said “we humans have the power to resist racism in our own lives and souls,” Lawson told the AP. “We have the power to make choices and say no to the wrong thing. That is also Jesus.”
Years later, in 1968, it was Lawson who organized the sanitation workers’ strike that ultimately drew King to Memphis. Lawson said he was initially paralyzed and forever saddened by King’s murder.
“I didn’t think I would live past 40,” Lawson said. “The threat of death was part of the discipline we lived with, but none so much as King.”
Yet Lawson made it his life’s mission to preach the power of nonviolent direct action.
“I’m still anxious and frustrated,” Lawson said as he marked the 50th anniversary of King’s death with a march in Memphis. “The task is not yet completed.”
Civil rights activist Diane Nash was a 21-year-old college student when she started attending Lawson’s workshops in Nashville, which she called life-changing.
“His passing represents a very great loss,” Nash said. “He bears, I think, more responsibility than anyone else for the nonviolent civil rights movement of blacks in this country.”
James Morris Lawson Jr. was born on September 22, 1928, the son and grandson of preachers, and grew up in Massillon, Ohio, where he himself was ordained as a high schooler.
He told The Tennessean that his commitment to nonviolence began in elementary school, when he told his mother that he had hit a boy who had made racist comments to him.
“What good was that, Jimmy?” his mother asked.
That simple question changed his life forever, Lawson said. He became a pacifist, refused to serve when drafted into the Korean War, and spent a year in prison as a conscientious objector. The Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist group, sponsored his trip to India after he earned a degree in sociology.
Gandhi had already been assassinated, but Lawson met people who had worked with him and explained Gandhi’s concept of ‘satyagraha’, a ruthless search for the truth, which encouraged Indians to peacefully reject British rule. Lawson then saw how the Christian concept of turning the other cheek could be applied in collective actions to challenge morally indefensible laws.
Lawson was studying divinity at Oberlin College in Ohio when King spoke on campus about the Montgomery bus boycott. King told him, “You can’t wait, you have to come South now,” Lawson recalled in an interview with the Associated Press.
Lawson soon enrolled in theology classes at Vanderbilt University, while leading younger activists through mock protests in which they practiced accepting insults without responding.
The technique quickly proved its power at lunch counters and movie theaters in Nashville, where on May 10, 1960, businesses agreed to remove “No Colored” signs that enforced white supremacy.
“It was the first major successful sign-down campaign,” and it created a template for the sit-ins that began to spread across the South, Lawson said.
Lawson was called upon to organize the so-called Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which sought to organize the spontaneous efforts of tens of thousands of students who began to challenge Jim Crow laws throughout the South.
Angry segregationists got Lawson kicked out of Vanderbilt, but he said he never harbored negative feelings about the university, where he returned in 2006 as a distinguished visiting professor and eventually donated a significant portion of his papers.
Lawson received his theology degree from Boston University and became a Methodist minister in Memphis, where his wife Dorothy Wood Lawson worked as an NAACP organizer. They moved to Los Angeles several years later, where Lawson led 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 remained active into his 90s, encouraging younger generations to harness their power. While praising the late Rep. John Lewis last year, he recalled how the young man he trained in Nashville turned solitary marches into masses, paving the way for important civil rights legislation.
“As we wish to 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 dismantle the evil in our midst,” Lawson said.
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This story has been corrected to correct the spelling of Gandhi.
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Loller reported from Nashville. Associated Press contributors include Adrian Sainz in Memphis and Michael Warren in Atlanta.