Reverend Dr. James Lawson Jr.
Reverend
Dr. James Lawson Jr.
Advisor - Black University
Reverend James Lawson is the chief architect of the modern American nonviolent movement for Freedom, and an unflinching Alpha male Lion.
This may seem paradoxical, that Lawson is both unreservedly nonviolent and an Alpha Lion. If so, it seems a paradox because of the tragic misrepresentation of the power of nonviolence in U.S. pop culture and historical education curriculum. Because this metaphor, a nonviolent lion, is like a finger pointing with precision toward the the engine of Satygraha/nonviolence. This engine is the greatest of human powers: soul force. Soul force is the term often used to describe that energy drawn upon in the Rosa Parks/Martin Luther King Jr. Freedom movement of the 50’s and 60’s.
In 1957, Lawson encountered Martin Luther King Jr. at Oberlin College, where Lawson was studying, and King was speaking. They were both twenty-eight years of age. After a brief, private, conversation King exclaimed, “Don’t wait! Come now! You’re badly needed. We don’t have anyone like you!” That day, King called on Lawson to bring his knowledge of nonviolence South, and join him in the fight for justice in America.
Beginning in high school, long before meeting King, Lawson was trained and battle-tested in the practice of nonviolent action. From 1951-52 Lawson spend 13 months in federal prisons in West Virginia and Kentucky for refusing the draft. Following his release from prison, he traveled to India in order to more formally study nonviolence. There, he spent three years teaching at Hislop College in Nagpur in Maharashtra. While in India, Lawson travelled to meet individuals who had worked alongside Gandhi in various struggles, thereby gaining practical knowledge from first-hand participants while visiting sites of action.
Jim Lawson grasped faster than almost any other American practitioner the compatibility of the lessons from Gandhi’s struggles with the campaigns then necessary in the United States. In 1954, while in India, he read of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and returned to the United States immediately to serve however he was able. After he met King, he embarked on the path he would follow for the rest of his life and started a relationship that would continue for years to come.
By autumn 1959, Lawson was in Nashville running weekly workshops at Fisk University to prepare students from all of the city’s institutions of higher learning for action. This interracial group of students became the heart of the Nashville movement. Weekly, they worked together on a profound interpretation of what it meant to take nonviolent action, with Lawson guiding discussions and analysis of strategy and nonviolent discipline.
They soon became the largest, most disciplined, and most influential of the campaigns that would become the 1960 southern student sit-in movement. Those he guided included Diane Nash, John Lewis, Marion Berry, Bernard Lafayette and others. Student sit-ins blazed across the South in 75 cities, with thousands of students participating. On Easter weekend 1960, sit-in leaders gathered from all the southern sit-in campaigns at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina and formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Lawson would become SNCC’s primary tutor of the technique of nonviolent action. Alongside his work with SNCC, Lawson continued to advise Dr. King and the SCLC, where he ran workshops on nonviolent civil resistance at every meeting for as long as King lived.
Quickly and often quietly, as the nonviolent movement for Freedom spread, the signs designating “Whites Only” came down in public accommodations and private institutions across the U.S.
In 1968, while involved in the Sanitation Workers Strike, Lawson invited Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis to speak. It was here that 15,000 people heard his famous “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech. The day after giving this speech King, Lawson’s best friend, was assassinated in Memphis. Despite the heartbreak of that loss, today, 52 years later, Reverend James Lawson fights on - at 91 years old.
In 1974, James Lawson moved to Los Angeles, California where he became pastor of Holman United Methodist Church and continued his social activism: Palestinian and immigrant rights, gay and lesbian issues, the Iraq wars, and poverty. In Los Angeles, Reverend Lawson taught an emerging group of social justice leaders— known as the Holman Group— which included María Elena Durazo, Gilbert Cedillo, Antonio Villaraigosa, and Karen Bass long before they were elected to public office. Today, he continues to work with hotel workers, janitors, and home care workers to advance nonviolent, direct-action campaigns that have helped transform the Los Angeles labor movement.
Jim Lawson is a living example of nonviolence/soul force, its power is in his very voice. Soul force, this invisible, mysterious, spiritual energy that humans may access, is what Black University is calling The Darkness. Reverend Jim Lawson graces Black University mightily as an advisor, for he is the singular treasure trove of the history and application of soul force.
Lawson shares with Black University a deep conviction that the Black American Slave spirituals represent an invincible spiritual force, one that is utterly unique. These spirituals are of shattering and profound artistry. This artistry, the Song of the Fields, has blossomed and flowered into numerous musical forms: Blues, Gospel, R & B/Soul, Jazz, Rock-n-Roll and even Hip Hop. The power of this art originates in what Reverend Lawson and the 60’s Freedom movement called “the concrete experience of Black people in U.S. history.” The Freedom movement’s frame of reference for social change was not academic liberalism or political progressivism or the essays of Karl Marx; their frame of reference was rooted in the historical slavery and the shackles that have been so painful to both the nation and to Blacks.
We are honored and deeply grateful to have the guidance of Reverend James Lawson Jr., a true treasure of Planet Earth. The Alpha Lion of Soul Force.