Key points:
- “Nonviolent: A Memoir of Resistance, Agitation and Love” documents the Rev. James Lawson Jr.’s prominent role working with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the Civil Rights Movement.
- Lawson, a United Methodist pastor, was a key but underpublicized figure in the movement of the 1960s and beyond.
- Had he lived, King would likely have worked on economic empowerment for minorities, which Lawson did until his death in 2024, said Emily Yellin,co-author of the book.
In November 1967, the Revs. Martin Luther King Jr. and James Lawson Jr. took a walk during a break at a retreat for members of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
On the campus of the Penn Center in South Carolina, they talked about the future of the Civil Rights Movement.
“They resolved that (economic empowerment) was the next hurdle,” said Emily Yellin, the co-author of a revelatory new memoir with Lawson, “Nonviolent: A Memoir of Resistance, Agitation and Love.”
That’s how deeply Lawson was involved in civil rights issues — in the center of strategic planning with King. Despite that, he is less well known than King and other colleagues of that era. The new book has the potential to correct that.
“This memoir is more than a reflection on the past,” said Taure Brown, director of the James Lawson Institute at Vanderbilt University, during a Feb. 18 book launch event in Nashville. “It is an invitation to reconsider what movement building actually demands.
“The Rev. Lawson’s life reminds us that nonviolence is not passive. It is not accommodation. It is not quiet-ism. It is confrontation — disciplined, strategic, morally grounded confrontation.”
Lawson and King were planning the Poor People’s March (in May and June of 1968) and, after that, “they were going to take a hiatus and really focus on (economic empowerment) as the next step in the movement,” Yellin said.
“After King was killed, (Lawson) spent the next 56 years doing (economic empowerment),” Yellin said. “I like to think that had King lived, he would have been working on the exact same things that Rev. Lawson was working on.”
Lawson intentionally kept a low profile in the 1960s.
“That was an agreement between him and Martin Luther King, that he stay out of the limelight so that he could be the strategist and be recruiting and training people,” Yellin said. “They needed someone to do that while everybody else got arrested and went to jail.”
The book is an insider’s account of the Civil Rights Movement and Lawson’s eventful life before and after. It was written partially to correct inaccuracies.
“Lawson was very concerned that some of the histories that have been written maybe didn’t get some things right,” Yellin said.
A good place to start is the term “Civil Rights Movement,” a label Lawson didn’t particularly like, said Vanderbilt University’s Dennis Dickerson, the Rev. James Lawson Chair in History, Emeritus, during the book launch.
“That (Civil Rights Movement) terminology has become almost biblical in the sense that that’s the standard term of usage,” Dickerson said. “There were civil rights aspects to it.”
Lawson, a United Methodist pastor, preferred the term “Nonviolence Movement in America.”
Related: Why Lawson selected Yellin as his co-author
“That’s a much broader sense of what they were after,” Dickerson said. “(It) was not only taking down the (whites only) signs, but also taking down the insinuation that those persons being excluded were less than human. It was not only about the gain of rights, but also about the restoration of dignity that was inherent in a human being.”
The book was almost complete when Lawson died June 9, 2024, at age 95. Along with familiar signposts like the April 4, 1968, assassination of King, it shares details about lesser-known subjects, such as Lawson’s 13 months of imprisonment for refusing to be drafted during the Korean War, after being sentenced to five years.
“I’m willing to die for this country, but I am not willing to kill for this country,” is how Lawson explained his actions. He was 19 or 20 when he took that stance and went to jail.
Lawson said the prison experience was valuable to him.
“One of the most valuable things I learned throughout my time in prison was that people who were called bad people were just people, human like myself, men like me,” Lawson said in the book. “I could not look down on them, because we were all equal.”
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Lawson was a good father, said son Judge John C. Lawson II. The younger Lawson serves on the Los Angeles County Superior Court, overseeing juvenile cases.
“I was the first born, and when they thought I was old enough, (my parents) both sat down and said, ‘We’re under threat.’ (My father said) ‘I’m under threat. It’s possible I could be killed. I’m trying to end racism.’”
In many respects, Lawson was an ordinary father to John and his two brothers, he said.
“He taught me how to swim and throw the football and enjoy sports,” Lawson II said. “The agreement in our household, between my mom and dad, was that he would come home for dinner every night. So 6 p.m. was dinner time, and he would normally come home. … Then after dinner, if he had other meetings or rallies or something to go to, he did.”
Lawson’s opinions could grate on some.
“He contended that the United States was the most violent country in the history of the world,” Yellin said during the book launch event. “We are the only country that’s ever dropped an atomic bomb. We have more guns than humans in this country. He said that all of us in the United States are brought up that violence is the strongest force in the world, and nothing can overcome it.
“His contention is that … the tactics and the philosophy and commitment to nonviolence is a force more powerful,” Yellin added.
Lawson II said his dad was “a completely moral person.”
“He was following in the footsteps of Jesus to try to create a world where you feed the hungry, you clothe the naked and that you study war no more,” Lawson II said. “We were all created equal in the eyes of God, and that we as a people, if we are determined to do so, we can make it happen.”
Patterson is a reporter for UM News. Contact him at (615) 742-5470 or [email protected]. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free UM News Digest.