Legendary civil rights leader brings teachings to Olympia

author : Nicholas Pace topic : Civil rights | Satyagraha

by Nicholas Pace

Civil rights leader James M. Lawson, Jr. will visit the Olympia community on May 2-5. Professor, Methodist minister, civil rights leader, sit-in organizer; and advisor to World Council of Churches, James Lawson has accomplished a great deal in his 80 years. Involved with the civil rights movement since its beginnings in the fifties, Lawson’s close friend Dr. Martin Luther Jr. once called him the “…the leading nonviolence theorist in the world.” Currently he is a professor of Vanderbilt University, and is now 80. Although you may not have read about him in your high school history book, this man definitely deserves a listen.

Lawson was involved in the Memphis Sanitation Strike when he served as a strategy coordinator for the Sanitation Strike Committee, which came into conflict with Mayor Henry Loeb. The Strike occurred after two sanitation workers were killed in an accident on a city truck. When the strike occurred, Loeb denounced the strike claiming it to be illegal. This would create split views between the city government and the NAACP. Lawson invited Dr. King to Memphis to support the strike. Hostilities arose in response to the boycotts set up by the strikers, and hundreds were arrested, and some even killed. It was in Memphis during the days of the strike that Dr. King was assassinated by James Earl Ray on April 4. Soon after, the strike would end and compromises would be made on April 16.

Born in September 22, 1928, Lawson grew up with a very social background as one of nine children in an integrated neighborhood in Massillon Ohio. An active youth, he engaged in debate, band, drama, and his father’s church and national Methodist youth organization. He attended Baldwin-Wallace College, in Berea, Ohio, where he studied the works of social equality philosophers and pioneers such as Gandhi and Tolstoy. Although it was rare in those days, Lawson was elected president of his majority white freshman class.

In 1951, during the Korean War, Lawson refused to report for the draft, which cost him both his education and ministerial deferments, and placed him in prison for fourteen months. He was able to continue his studies on non-violent activism set by Gandhi when he was paroled for the Methodist mission in India. From there he went to Nagpur, India as coach and minister to student Christian movements out of Hislop College in Nagpur. He gained a new perspective on the world through learning Gandhi’s methods of Satyagraha, and continued to practice the teachings in the United States.

Lawson returned to the U.S. where he enrolled at Oberlin College graduate school of theology in Ohio. It is here that he met Dr. King, during the beginnings of King’s major social movement with the Montgomery Bus Boycott. King invited Lawson into his movement, since both of them were heavily influenced by Gandhi and his principles of non-violence. Lawson became an education coordinator for his movement. Lawson moved down to Nashville, Tennessee in 1960, and enrolled in Vanderbilt University Divinity School. Once again Lawson came into conflict with the authorities when he was expelled for leading mass student demonstrations with his creation of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Although some people have considered the sit-ins as passive methods of bringing social justice, Lawson’s opinion differed, when he stated in an interview in an article of the Southern Patriot, a North Carolina magazine: “Many people call the passivity of Negro ‘non-violence.’ But nothing could be further from the truth. As the sit-ins demonstrate, genuine non-violence is active and dynamic.” The method Lawson used in the sit-in was based on the training he received in India.

Lawson also kept in contact with India by becoming an Advisor to World Council of Churches assembly at New Delhi, in 1961. In 1962 he continued to work in Tennessee as a pastor of Centenary Methodist Church, and was chairman of a War on Poverty advisory committee. During the days of the Vietnam War, Lawson visited South Vietnam with the international and interfaith team, also becoming involved with the Vietnamese Buddhist pacifist movement and a world tour by Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh.

Lawson later moved to Los Angeles to lead the Holman United Methodist Church, which he continued to do for the next 25 years. He still works to challenge current agendas and contribute to causes such as immigrants’ rights in the United States, the rights of Palestinians, and has spoken against most of the wars declared by the U.S. such as the Cold War, Vietnam, and the current war on Iraq. He constantly challenges racism in the nation and is a strong believer in workers’ rights. In the current decade Lawson received the Community of Christ International Peace Award, and in 2006 he received an apology from Vanderbilt for the unfair treatment he received there due to his civil rights activism.

On Monday May 5, Professor Lawson will talk with the Evergreen State College in Lecture Hall 1 from 12-4 PM. He will talk to the Olympia community at the Temple Beth Hatfiloh from 7-9 PM.