ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
A key architect of the Civil Rights Movement has died. The Rev. James Lawson was a staunch advocate for nonviolent resistance to racism, even in the face of brutality. A Methodist minister and student of Gandhi, Lawson was a mentor to Civil Rights leaders, including Diane Nash and the late John Lewis. The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. once called him the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence. He was 95 years old. NPR's Debbie Elliott has this remembrance.
DEBBIE ELLIOTT, BYLINE: James Morris Lawson Jr. was born in Uniontown, Pa., in 1928. His father and grandfather were Methodist ministers, but Lawson credited his mother for instilling in him the power of nonviolent resistance. In a 2018 interview with NPR, he described coming home from an altercation when he was just 8 years old.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
JAMES MORRIS LAWSON JR: For the first time after running an errand on a spring day, I had just slapped a white child for calling me the N word.
ELLIOTT: He said his mother asked him what good that served and told him there must be a better way. So Lawson vowed to follow that path.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
LAWSON: So as a consequence of that and her conversation with me that afternoon, I decided that I would never again fight with my fist to hurt somebody, to beat up people on the playing field or in response to racist hatred.
ELLIOTT: In college, Lawson joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a pacifist group rooted in his Christian faith, and served prison time for refusing to register for the military draft. In the 1950s, as a Methodist missionary in India, he studied the nonviolent philosophy of Mahatma Gandhi. Back home at the Graduate School of Theology at Oberlin College in Ohio, he met the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. It was 1957, and King was fresh off the successful Montgomery bus boycott in Alabama, which integrated public transportation. Lawson told NPR they immediately found common ground, and King encouraged him to come South.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
LAWSON: And he said very quickly, without reservation, come now. Don't wait. We need you now.
ELLIOTT: Lawson transferred to Vanderbilt University in Nashville and began leading Saturday workshops in nonviolent strategies to desegregate downtown.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
LAWSON: I charted a course of doing sit-ins and then adding to that mass meetings, adding to that pickets, to do an economic boycott, then said we could do marches and other kinds of nonviolent direct actions.
ELLIOTT: The idea, he said, was to build on what was achieved in Montgomery and grow what he considered to be a Black freedom movement with staying power. Among other campaigns, Lawson helped craft strategies for the Nashville sit-ins, the Freedom Rides and the Birmingham Children's Crusade. The list of his students reads like a who's who of Civil Rights luminaries - among them, John Lewis, Diane Nash, Bernard Lafayette, and the Little Rock Nine, the Black students who integrated Central High School. Here's Georgia Congressman John Lewis in a 1998 interview with NPR, recalling his early embrace of the movement as a student in Nashville.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
JOHN LEWIS: When I first heard of Jim Lawson, this young, Black Methodist minister, preaching and teaching the philosophy of love and action, nonviolence, passive resistance, soul force, I knew this was for me. I was ready to accept this. I knew this was the way out.
ELLIOTT: Lawson was instrumental in the formation of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, known as SNCC, and was active in the King-led Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was expelled from Vanderbilt after being arrested at protests. By 1968, Lawson - then a pastor in Memphis - was mapping strategy for a sanitation workers strike with the slogan, I am a man. Here he is back then.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
LAWSON: It's still racism. For at the heart of racism is the idea that a man is not a man.
I used some of the movement language that you are men. You're a child of God. You are somebody. You are the light of the world, Jesus said. Segregation tries to pretend that you're not a human being, you're not a man. But you have to fight that. Claim your humanity before God.
ELLIOTT: It was Lawson who recruited Martin Luther King to march with the striking sanitation workers in Memphis, a fateful decision. The night before King was assassinated, he praised Rev. Lawson during his final speech at Mason Temple.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR: I want to commend the preacher under the leadership of these noble men, James Lawson, one who has been in this struggle for many years. He's been to jail for struggling. He's been kicked out of Vanderbilt University for this struggle, but he's still going on fighting for the rights of his people.
ELLIOTT: Fifty years later, Lawson remembered that evening in vivid detail.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
LAWSON: For me, it was one of the zenith experiences of a whole movement.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
KING: We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now because I've been to the mountain top.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
LAWSON: There was a sense inside of warmth and unity. We're engaged in a great struggle.
ELLIOTT: Lawson decried the riots and violence that broke out after King's killing. Reflecting 50 years later, he said the assassination sapped both momentum for change and support for nonviolent resistance.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
LAWSON: That has continued to grieve me. His death, it happened in Memphis. Wherever it was going to happen, that still grieves me because of what it did to the nation, the loss.
ELLIOTT: Lawson befriended the man who confessed to killing King, James Earl Ray. He ministered to Ray in prison and presided at his funeral. Lawson was the pastor of Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles for much of his latter career and remained active well into his 90s, teaching nonviolent strategies to young activists and engaging in campaigns for a number of human rights issues. In 2020, he spoke at his former student, John Lewis', funeral.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
LAWSON: At an early age, we recognized the wrong under which we were forced to live. And we swore to God that by God's grace, we would do whatever God called us to do in order to put on the table of the nation's agenda. This must end. Black lives matter.
(APPLAUSE)
ELLIOTT: Lawson never gave up on the idea that the Black freedom movement would prevail, calling it the second major American revolutionary struggle. Debbie Elliott, NPR News.
Copyright © 2024 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.