One of the highlights of John Lewis’s funeral on July 30 was being able to see and hear Lewis’s mentor, the Reverend James M. Lawson Jr., now ninety-one.
In his twenty-one-minute eulogy at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, Lawson recounted the accomplishments of the civil rights movement, and the work that still needs to be done. “We will not be silent while our economy is run by plantation capitalism,” Lawson said.
“No human being in the sight of God is illegal,” Lawson declared at one of the rallies. “The fight for the civil rights of workers who come here from all over the world is the same as the Freedom Rides of 1961 and the continuing struggle for civil and human rights for all.”
A legendary figure among civil rights activists, but not well-known to the wider public, Lawson was praised at the funeral by former President Barack Obama, who said he, like Lewis, had inspired him to become an activist. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. once called Lawson “the greatest teacher of nonviolence in America.”
In September 1959, when Lawson was a divinity student at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, he began holding workshops in a church basement for students from the university and four local Black colleges: Fisk, American Baptist College, Meharry Medical College, and Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State University.
It had been six years since the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education and four years since the year-long Montgomery Bus Boycott, which King helped organize, but not much had changed. Lawson believed that only a nonviolent movement, led by young people, would end segregation. It would require physical courage, unshakable conviction, and a willingness to forgive those who would beat them.
Drawing on both Christian and Gandhian principles, Lawson convinced students that they had the potential to overturn segregation through the righteousness of their ideas and the power of nonviolent protest.
“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,” Lawson recalled in his eulogy of Lewis. “Black lives matter!”
Lawson was a master strategist and careful planner. In his workshops, small groups of students, Black and white, engaged in role-playing exercises. Some played angry white racists pounding on protesters while calling them racist epithets. Lawson taught them to withstand the taunts, slurs, and blows of the segregationists and to protect themselves without retaliating.
They began taking part in sit-ins at downtown businesses in 1959. Many of Lawson’s protégés—including Lewis, Diane Nash, Bernard Lafayette, James Bevel, and Marion Barry—became movement leaders. Throughout his life, Lewis spoke of Lawson’s workshops as his training ground.
In February 1960, inspired by the sit-ins in Greensboro, North Carolina, students crammed into Nashville’s First Baptist Church, eager to join the crusade. The students wanted to stage a sit-in the next day, but Lawson was worried that, without training in nonviolence, the action would be a disaster. He eventually led a crash course in nonviolence that lasted well into the night. “I was scared to death,” he told the audience at Lewis’s funeral.
The next morning, about 500 activists, including Lewis, went en masse to Nashville’s downtown stores, requesting to be served. They dressed impeccably and carried books to read. One group of students sat at a counter, were knocked down, beaten, and arrested. Then another group took their place, and the pattern was repeated.
Some white thugs poured ketchup over the students and crushed lit cigarettes onto their necks. As David Halberstam relates the incident in his book The Children, a white boy punched the Reverend C. T. Vivian as the Black minister knelt in prayer. One of the protesters, forgetting Lawson’s teaching, raised his fists to retaliate.
“Put your hands in your pockets!” commanded Vivian, who also died on July 17, the same day as Lewis. The protester obeyed.
More than 150 students were arrested. A lead editorial in the Nashville Banner, one of the city’s two daily newspapers, quoted Lawson as urging students to “violate the law,” which the paper called “the incitation to anarchy.”
Outraged by the arrests and the brutal treatment of the student protesters, Nashville’s African American community organized a boycott of downtown stores. Many whites also stayed away, some out of sympathy, others out of fear. Business leaders pressured the mayor and city council to resolve the controversy.
In April, after the home of a prominent Black lawyer was bombed, the mayor publicly acknowledged, in front of a large crowd of protesters and with the press looking on, that segregation was wrong. The next month, Nashville’s lunch counters began to serve African Americans.
Ella Baker, a veteran civil rights organizer, invited Lawson to deliver the keynote speech at the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s founding meeting in April 1960. The sit-ins, Lawson told the assembled activists, represented a “judgment upon middle class conventional half-way efforts to deal with radical social evil.”
At the same time he was leading the movement, Lawson pursued his master’s degree in divinity at Vanderbilt University. He was one of only a handful of Black students at Vanderbilt, which had begun admitting Black graduate students but not Black undergraduates.
Lawson persuaded King to come to Memphis to support the strikers and to generate national attention for the walkout. King’s last speech was given at the Mason Temple, the day before he was murdered as he stood on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel.
Amid the growing sit-ins, and under pressure from university board members, the dean of the Divinity School asked Lawson to withdraw. Lawson refused, and the board expelled him. But the university got more than it bargained for. Lawson’s expulsion, reported on the front page of The New York Times, motivated ten Divinity School professors, including the dean, to resign in protest, forcing the school to eventually offer Lawson a reinstatement. He opted instead to complete his degree at Boston University.
In 1961, after the first wave of Freedom Riders were met with mob violence, including the fire-bombing of a bus in Alabama, some activists thought the project should be halted. The Nashville students called Lawson, who endorsed the students’ plan to send a new wave of Freedom Riders to Alabama to continue the campaign. Lawson told the students he would join them.
On May 24, a number of “graduates” from Lawson’s workshops joined other activists and about a dozen reporters in boarding the Trailways bus from Montgomery, Alabama, to Jackson, Mississippi. Despite warnings of bomb threats along the way, the riders arrived safely in Jackson and, upon exiting the bus, filed into the “whites only” waiting room. They were promptly arrested.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) offered to pay the riders bail, but they refused, preferring to remain in jail. Two days later, Lawson and the other arrested riders appeared in court. The judge, an extreme segregationist, found all twenty-seven defendants guilty, sentencing each to pay a $200 fine. He wanted them out of Mississippi and the national media spotlight. But many of them refused to pay their fines and instead served sentences in Mississippi's notorious Parchman Prison, where some were beaten by the guards. In the meantime, hundreds of other Freedom Riders had joined the crusade, drawing worldwide attention that heightened the unease within the Kennedy Administration.
On June 16, a delegation of Freedom Riders and their supporters, including Lawson, met with Attorney General Robert Kennedy at the Justice Department in Washington, D.C. The delegation wanted Kennedy to intervene on behalf of the riders unfairly arrested in Mississippi.
Kennedy, who urged the activists to channel their energies into voter registration, pressured the Federal Interstate Commerce Commission to issue new policies desegregating bus travel. The commission announced new rules in September 1961 whereby passengers would be permitted to sit wherever they pleased on interstate buses and trains, “white” and “colored” signs would come down in the terminals, and bus station lunch counters would have to serve people regardless of race.
In 1968, when Lawson was pastor of Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis, he was asked to lead a strategy committee that was assisting the city’s Black sanitation workers, who toiled in dangerous conditions for pitiful wages and no benefits.
On January 31 of that year, twenty-two Black workers were sent home when it began raining. White employees were not sent home. When the rain stopped after an hour or so, the white workers continued to work and were paid for the full day, while the Black workers lost a day’s pay.
The next day, two Black sanitation workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker, were crushed to death by a malfunctioning city garbage truck. These two incidents epitomized the workers’ long-standing grievances.
On February 12, 1,300 Black sanitation workers in Memphis went on strike. They demanded a pay raise, overtime pay, merit promotions without regard to race, and city recognition of AFSCME as their union bargaining agent. For the next several months, city officials refused to negotiate. In private, Mayor Loeb reportedly told associates, “I’ll never be known as the mayor who signed a contract with a Negro union.”
Lawson worked with other activists to put pressure on the City Council and the downtown business establishment to address the workers’ concerns. He mobilized community support for the striking workers, including protest rallies, demonstrations, and a sit-in at City Hall.
The Memphis police attacked the union members, ministers, and others indiscriminately, often using clubs and mace. While Lawson counseled nonviolence, the police were clearly trying to provoke the protesters, even arresting some of them for jaywalking.
Lawson persuaded King to come to Memphis to support the strikers and to generate national attention for the walkout. King’s last speech was given at the Mason Temple, the day before he was murdered as he stood on the balcony of his room at the Lorraine Motel.
After President Lyndon B. Johnson ordered federal troops to Memphis, the Memphis City Council passed a resolution recognizing the union. The strikers won a fourteen-month contract that included union dues check-off, a grievance procedure, and wage increases.
Lawson was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, and raised in Massillon, Ohio. His father came from Canada, to which his forebears, former slaves, had migrated. His father was a strong-willed Methodist preacher, known for packing a pistol in his belt. He taught his son, the sixth of nine children, to fight for himself even if the odds were against him.
Lawson’s mother, who had immigrated to the United States from Jamaica, saw strength in universal love. Once a little white boy much smaller than Lawson had called him a “nigger”; Lawson slapped the boy across the face. He proudly told his mother about the incident, but she admonished him, urging him always to be guided by love. The moment, he later reflected, was a “sanctification,” an epiphany that there was a better way to be.
By the time he reached Baldwin-Wallace College, in Berea, Ohio, Lawson’s ideas about nonviolence and political activism were rapidly coming together. He met A. J. Muste when the pacifist leader of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) spoke on campus, and he immediately joined FOR’s local chapter.
In the spring of his senior year, Lawson received a draft notice. Although by then he had decided to pursue ministry and could have received a deferment, he refused to request one. He thought it was unconscionable for the clergy to be deferred while others had to serve. He ended up serving thirteen months in prison for refusing to fight in the Korean War.
After his release, Lawson moved to Nagpur, India, where he worked for three years as a Methodist missionary and studied satyagraha—the principles of nonviolent resistance developed by Mohandas K. Gandhi.
One day in 1955, while in India, Lawson was reading a newspaper and saw photographs of masses of African Americans launching a bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama. He began whooping, clapping, and dancing in joy. This shocked a colleague in the next hut, who only knew Lawson as a serious and cerebral man.
But for Lawson, the photographs offered evidence that a nonviolent mass movement was taking hold back home. Moreover, the boycott movement was being led by a young Christian minister of about the same age as Lawson.
After returning to the United States, Lawson began working on his master’s degree in theology at Oberlin College. From there, he planned to go to Yale Divinity School, and then, he reasoned, he would be adequately prepared to go to the South and work for civil rights.
But in 1956, King came to Oberlin to speak, and the two men made an instant connection. King urged Lawson to come immediately to the South. In 1958, Muste appointed Lawson the FOR’s southern field secretary, allowing him to move to Nashville, and to travel throughout the South conducting workshops in nonviolence for small groups of Black teenagers, college students, and adults, many of them cosponsored with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
In 1974, Lawson left the South, accepting the position of pastor at the 2,700-member Holman Methodist Church in Los Angeles. There he became involved with the labor movement, the American Civil Liberties Union, and movements for reproductive choice, immigrant rights, and gay rights. He served as chairman of the Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice. He also served as national chair of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.
Lawson was one of three dozen people arrested in 1989 at the Federal Building in downtown Los Angeles while protesting U.S. support for the government of El Salvador. In 1997, he led protest rallies to push the Los Angeles City Council to approve an ordinance to raise wages for workers employed by private companies that got municipal subsidies and contracts. The next year, he marched onto the University of Southern California campus in support of unionized food service and facilities workers. He took part in a 2003 Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride to mobilize public support to immigration reform and challenge the widespread immigrant-bashing that occurred in the wake of 9/11.
“No human being in the sight of God is illegal,” Lawson declared at one of the rallies. “The fight for the civil rights of workers who come here from all over the world is the same as the Freedom Rides of 1961 and the continuing struggle for civil and human rights for all.”
While serving the Holman church, he hosted Lawson Live, a weekly cable television and call-in radio show, where he discussed social justice issues. Since retiring from Holman in 1999, he has continued to teach workshops and courses at UCLA and Cal State-Northridge on the history and tactics of nonviolence, and to mentor young activists. Historian Michael Honey’s 2016 documentary film, Love and Solidarity, depicts Lawson’s contributions to workers’ rights, civil rights, and nonviolent protest.
“We need the Congress and the President to work unfalteringly on behalf of every boy and every girl so that every baby born on these shores will have access to the tree of life,” Lawson said in his July 30 eulogy. “That’s the only way to honor John Robert Lewis. No other way.”