{"id":53860,"date":"2024-06-11T17:23:56","date_gmt":"2024-06-11T17:23:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wagingnonviolence.org\/forusa\/?p=53860"},"modified":"2024-07-03T23:23:34","modified_gmt":"2024-07-03T23:23:34","slug":"remembering-james-lawson-fierce-dedication-power-nonviolent-action","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wagingnonviolence.org\/forusa\/2024\/06\/remembering-james-lawson-fierce-dedication-power-nonviolent-action\/","title":{"rendered":"Remembering James Lawson and his fierce dedication to the power of nonviolent action"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Martin Luther King Jr. called him \u201cthe leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world.\u201d To Rep. John Lewis, he was \u201cthe architect of the nonviolence movement<\/a>.\u201d Jesse Jackson simply called him \u201cthe teacher.\u201d We at the Fellowship of Reconciliation are blessed to have counted him among our core team of organizers and as a pillar of our spiritually-grounded movement for nonviolent social change. It is with reverence that we remember his life and time with us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

James M. Lawson Jr., who died Sunday at age 95, was born on Sept. 22, 1928 in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. His family moved to Massillon, Ohio, when he was young, and as a deeply Christian family \u2013 his father and grandfather were ministers \u2013 Lawson began regularly reading the Bible. He had a prophetic and liberatory interpretation of the Gospels from an early age. In a 2014 interview published by Fellowship<\/em> magazine, Lawson told Diane Lefer, \u201cBy the end of my high school years, I came to recognize that that whole business \u2014 walk the second mile, turn the other cheek, pray for the enemy, see the enemy as a fellow human being \u2014 was a resistance movement. It was not an acquiescent affair or a passive affair. I saw it as a place where my own life grew in strength inwardly, and where I had actually seen people changed because I responded with the other cheek. I went the second mile with them.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lawson attended Baldwin-Wallace College in nearby Berea, Ohio, and soon met A.J. Muste, FOR-USA executive secretary, who was on a speaking tour. Muste was renowned as a foremost proponent and strategist of nonviolent direct action. World War II had just ended, a time when FOR members like Bayard Rustin<\/a> \u2014 the Black antiwar and civil rights leader \u2014 were imprisoned for resisting conscription. Lawson was immediately inspired to join FOR. Its members had also recently founded the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, in Chicago, and Lawson and his brother Phil traveled to participate in CORE trainings in different cities. As he told FOR\u2019s Richard Deats in a 1999 interview, Lawson began reading Tolstoy, Thoreau, Andr\u00e9 Trocm\u00e9<\/a>, Gandhi, Nehru, and other religious and philosophical theorists and practitioners \u2014 and he was drawn even closer to FOR\u2019s commitments.<\/p>\n\n\n

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(FOR archives)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n

Graduating college in 1950, as the Cold War grew, Lawson determined he would resist the military draft. He was sent to prison and served 13 months. Upon his release, influenced by his formative engagement with radical thinkers from around the globe, Lawson decided to live overseas. He was drawn to religious ministry, and through his Methodist roots he initially intended to move to Zimbabwe (then known as Southern Rhodesia).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, in 1953, he accepted an offer from Hislop College in Nagpur, India, to teach and coach athletics. Following in the footsteps of FOR members Howard Thurman (1936) and Rustin (1948), who had initiated connections between the African American freedom struggle and Indian self-determination movements, Lawson spent the next three years on the subcontinent in deep study of Gandhi\u2019s life and the satyagraha movement. \u201cI combined the methodological analysis of Gandhi with the teachings of Jesus, who concludes that there are no human beings that you can exclude from the grace of God,\u201d Lawson described to Lefer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was while he was in India that the Montgomery Bus Boycott began. \u201cThe use of nonviolence on the part of African Americans was a very important thing for me,\u201d Lawson told Deats. Heading home from Asia in 1956, he traveled westward across central Africa, from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic. \u201cEverywhere I went, I got the question about who Martin Luther King is, what kind of man is he,\u201d Lawson said in a 2022 interview with Nehemiah Stark for the King and Breaking Silence Coalition. He added, \u201cI saw his pictures on the walls of school buildings, cut out of magazines and newspapers, and on village homes in East Africa.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He returned to Ohio and was completing graduate studies at the Oberlin School of Theology when King, visiting the campus, insisted his expertise was needed \u2014 not eventually, but immediately. \u201cI mentioned to [King] that while in college I had long wanted to work in the South \u2014 especially because of segregation \u2014 as a place of work, and that I wanted to do that still,\u201d Lawson recalled to Deats. \u201cAnd, his response was: \u2018Come now! Don\u2019t wait! Don\u2019t put it off too long. We need you NOW. The movement doesn\u2019t have anyone with your background, your experience.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lawson informed Muste that he had decided to move South. Muste quickly mobilized FOR to offer a paid position as its Southern Field Secretary. In this new role, Lawson would work with Glenn Smiley, a white United Methodist minister based in Los Angeles, who coordinated FOR\u2019s field operations nationwide (and had, along with Rustin, advised King on the strategy for building the Montgomery Bus Boycott).<\/p>\n\n\n\n