Rev. James Lawson Jr. was a maverick of the Civil Rights movement, honored and mourned internationally when he passed in June of 2024. Recognized as a moral firebrand from an earlier generation, and only a year older than Martin Luther King Jr., Lawson had —fortuitously — already been collaborating on an autobiography in his final years, working closely with Memphis author Emily Yellin. Together, they crafted a fascinating narrative that takes readers from Lawson’s earliest childhood memories through the travails and triumphs of his decades as an activist of the cloth, when he translated his personal philosophy into actions that forever altered the course history. And, appropriately enough, it’s from that philosophy that the book takes its title: Nonviolent.
The book’s subtitle, A Memoir of Resistance, Agitation, and Love, perfectly sums up the key pillars of that philosophy. What’s striking is how early Lawson began pondering such matters. The vivid portrait of his childhood in Ohio reads like a bildungsroman not unlike classics of Black American autobiographical literature like Gordon Parks’ The Learning Tree or Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land. And from the beginning he finds himself caught between two opposing principles concerning violence, epitomized by his punching of another kid for calling him a racial slur — at the age of four.
“The memory of that moment has never left me,” Lawson writes, and it’s the perfect introduction to his youthful inner anguish over following the counsel of his father, who approved of fighting back against racist provocations, and his mother, who absolutely disapproved of it. For a time, he saw the efficacy of his father’s approach: “I believed I had taught [the racist kid] a lesson. And no one in our group of playmates ever called me those names again, including him. My punching worked. Or so I thought.”
Yet he began to see the wisdom of his mother’s counsel to avoid violence, expressed in her exhortation that he “be natural.” To her, violence was a perversion of human nature, a mask or a script that trapped its perpetrators in an endless cycle. Lawson embraced this as he grew into his teens. An exceptionally thoughtful young man, devoted to his parents, his studies, and his faith, he had already become a local pastor at the age of 19.
That put him squarely on a path of leadership that he would pursue all his life. And it was in his teen years that he embraced nonviolence as a philosophy that generated results, experimenting with confronting casual racism not with punches, but with disarming conversation or sheer stubbornness. He refused to register for the draft, seeing even conscientious objector status as bowing to a morally bankrupt system, and went to jail for it. He journeyed to India to study the methods of Gandhi, and later, while a graduate student at Oberlin College, he met Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and shared his insights into nonviolent activism with him. After Lawson told King he might move South to preach after graduate school, King’s reply would change his life: “Come now. Don’t wait.”
That set the stage for all that followed. Dropping out of Oberlin and relocating to Nashville, Lawson became the southern director for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, from there helping to launch some of the most groundbreaking demonstrations of the early ’60s, often working closely with King. Named pastor of Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis in 1962, he went on to organize the sanitation workers’ strike of 1968. And in 1974, he moved to Los Angeles, where he lived and supported civil rights activism until his death. Anyone who cares about forging a more just America will know those historical events, from the Freedom Rides to the sit-ins, but to read the details of such moments knowing the backstory of one of their chief strategists makes them more real than ever, and somehow more achievable — today and in the future.
Emily Yellin, John Lawson (Rev. James Lawson’s son), and Carol Jenkins will speak about Lawson’s memoir at the National Civil Rights Museum this Friday, February 20th, at 6 p.m.