Legendary civil rights leader dies at age 95
The Rev. James Lawson Jr., an icon of the Civil Rights Movement and the longtime pastor of Holman United Methodist Church (UMC) in the West Adams District, died from cardiac arrest on Monday morning at the age of 95.
Los Angeles City Councilwoman Heather Hutt, who led a street-dedication ceremony for Lawson in January outside Holman UMC, confirmed the death, telling the press in a statement: “Rev. James Morris Lawson was a leader of our community and world, whose messages of love and nonviolence left an indelible mark on the Civil Rights Movement and influenced many. I am deeply saddened to hear of his passing, but know his legacy will continue to guide us for generations to come. His message of love will forever live on in every heart he touched. May he rest in power.”
Assemblyman Mike Gipson (65th District) said in a statement that he was saddened by the death of the “Civil Rights Movement legend.”
“Yet as sad as I feel to lose an icon, I am in awe of such an accomplished life,” Gipson said. “It leaves a legacy including the nonviolence work of the James Lawson Institute, an immense body of writings published during his time in California, and the many ways that our community champions the cause of others’ freedom to this day. May he rest in peace.”
An ultimate teacher of nonviolent resistance
Author and talk show host Tavis Smiley posted on social media: “We have lost a giant. The ultimate teacher and practitioner of civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance. His message resonates in a moment when violence abounds at home and abroad. His sobering voice will be sorely missed.”
The Rev. Al Sharpton, founder and president of the National Action Network, said this: “James Lawson was the ultimate preacher, prophet and activist. In his senior years, I was privileged to spend time with him at his church in Los Angeles. He would tell me inside stories of the battles of the 1950s and ‘60s that he and Dr. King and others engaged in. Lawson helped to change this nation. Thank God the nation never changed him.”
Lawson was pastor of Holman United Methodist Church from 1974 until his retirement in 1999. A mile-long stretch of Adams Boulevard from Crenshaw Boulevard to Arlington Avenue in front of the church is co-named as the Rev. James Lawson Mile.
Born James Morris Lawson Jr. Sept. 22, 1928, in Uniontown, Penn., the son and grandson of Methodist ministers (his parents were Rev. James Morris and Philane May Cover Lawson), Lawson was reared in Massillon, Ohio.
Conscientious objector at start of Korean War
After high school, Lawson enrolled at Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, where he became a member of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), both organizations which were devoted advocates of nonviolent resistance to racism. Lawson was drafted by the U.S. Army, but refused to serve in the Korean War citing “conscientious objector” status due to his belief in nonviolence. In April 1951, Lawson was found guilty of violating the draft laws of the United States and was sentenced to three years in federal prison.
Released after 13 months, Lawson returned to Baldwin-Wallace to earn his bachelor’s degree. Afterward, he traveled to Nagpur, India as a Methodist missionary to study the nonviolence resistance tactics (“satyagraha” or “a relentless pursuit of Truth” which encouraged the Indians to peacefully reject British rule) espoused by Mohandas (aka “Mahatma) Gandhi. Lawson’s particular contribution was to introduce ganhian principles to people more familiar with biblical teachings, showing how direct action could expose the immorality and fragility of racist White power structures.
Gandhi had been assassinated by then, but Lawson met people who had worked with him and explained the practice of nonviolent resistance. Lawson then saw how the Christian concept of “turning the other cheek” could be applied in collective actions to challenge morally indefensible laws.
Gandhi said “that we persons have the power to resist the racism in our own lives and souls,” Lawson told the Associated Press years ago. “We have the power to make choices and to say no to that wrong. That’s also Jesus.”
Embracing the principles of Gandhi
Lawson returned to the United States in 1956, entering the Graduate School of Theology at Oberlin College in Ohio. According to a biography from the Stanford University-based Martin Luther King, Jr. Research & Education Institute, one of Lawson’s Oberlin professors introduced him to King, who had also embraced Gandhi’s principles of nonviolent resistance.
When Lawson met King in 1957, King urged him to move to the South and begin teaching nonviolent protest on a large scale. “Come now,” King said then. “We don’t have anyone like you down there.” King called him “the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world.” Later that year, Lawson transferred to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn. and enrolled at the campus divinity School.
It was at Vanderbilt where he became the southern director for the organization FOR. Soon he began organizing workshops on nonviolence for community members and students at Vanderbuilt and for students at the city’s four Black college campuses. These activists, who included Diane Nash, Marion Barry, John Lewis, Bernard Lafayette and James Bevel, planned nonviolent demonstrations in Nashville, conducting “test” sit-ins in late 1959. It was during this period that civil rights activists learned how a “sit-in” at an ordinary restaurant could equate generations later to “standing up” for humanity.
In February 1960, following lunch counter sit-ins initiated by students at a Woolworth’s store in Greensboro, NC, Lawson and several local activists launched a similar protest in Nashville’s downtown stores. After the Greensboro sit-ins, more than 150 students were arrested that spring before city leaders agreed to remove the “No Colored” signs that enforced White supremacy. Some–but not all–lunch counters were desegregated. The discipline of the Nashville students became a model for sit-ins in other southern cities.
Long ties with Vanderbilt University
“It was the first major successful campaign to pull the signs down, and it created a template for the first sit-ins that began to spread across the South,” Lawson said.
Angry segregationists got Lawson expelled from Vanderbuilt in March 1960, but he said he never harbored hard feelings about the university, where he returned decades later as a distinguished visiting professor. He eventually donated a significant portion of his papers to the university.
The school established an institute for the research and study of nonviolent movements bearing his name in 2021.
Lawson participated in the 1961 Freedom Rides which challenged segregation on interstate buses and bus terminals. Lawson and the Nashville student leaders were influential in the founding conference of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), held in 1960. Their commitment to nonviolence and the Christian ideal of what Lawson would call “the redemptive community” helped to shape SNCC’s direction. Lawson co-authored a statement of purpose adopted by the conference, which emphasized the religious and philosophical foundations of nonviolent direct action.
Lawson was involved with the FOR from 1957 to 1969, SNCC from 1960-64, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) from 1960-67. For each organization, he led workshops on nonviolent methods of protest–often in preparation for major campaigns–and, of course, how the marchers would respond when confronted by law enforcement and citizen opposition in general.
Lawson became pastor of Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis, Tenn. in 1962. In 1968, when Black sanitation workers in Memphis began a strike for higher wages and union recognition after two of their co-workers were accidentally crushed to death, Lawson served as chairman of their strike committee.
Poor People’s Campaign
Lawson and King led a march in support of the strikers on March 28, 1968, which erupted in violence and was immediately called off.
In what would be his final speech on April 3, 1968, one day before his assassination, King spoke of Lawson as one of the “noble men” who had influenced the Black freedom struggle. Lawson said he was at first “paralyzed” and “forever saddened by King’s assassination.
“I thought I wouldn’t live beyond 40 myself,” Lawson said. “The imminence of death was part of the discipline we live with, but no one as much as King.”
King once said this about Lawson: “He’s been going to jail for struggling; he’s been kicked out of
Vanderbilt University for this struggling; but he’s still going on, fighting for the rights of his people.”
In his 2020 eulogy of one of his first pupils, Georgia Rep. John Lewis, Lawson recalled how the young man he trained in Nashville grew lonely marches into multitudes, paving the way for major civil rights legislation.
“If we would honor and celebrate John Lewis’ life, let us then recommit our souls, our hearts, our minds, our bodies and our strength to the contributing journey to dismantle the wrong in our midst,” Lawson said.
Funeral services for Rev. James Lawson were pending at press time.
