A Reflection on The Legacy of Reverend James Lawson Jr.
Dr. Da’Von Boyd, Columnist
On June 9, 2024, Reverend James Lawson Jr. died at 95. As one of the proverbial hidden figures of the long civil rights movement, the Reverend Lawson’s moral genius and political pragmatism were most reflected outside the public gaze in his radical democratic pedagogy and enduring commitment to nonviolent philosophy as both the embodiment of Christian redemptive theology and the substratum of a radical politics. After refusing to serve in the military during the Korean War and his subsequent parole to the Methodist Board of Missions, the Reverend Lawson labored as a devout missionary in India, studying Gandhian nonviolence against British colonial rule. With prophetic clarity, the Reverend Lawson recognized the liberatory potential of methods of non-cooperation and nonviolence in igniting the moral and political transformation of apartheid regimes by challenging the morality of the ruling class through the material divestments of the oppressed class and the dramatization of the indignity and injustice of their systemic oppression. With a sensitivity to the implacability of American institutions to conventional politics in pursuits towards racial egalitarianism, the Reverend Lawson sought to center nonviolence as a political program in the Black freedom struggle in his outstanding endeavors in the Fellowship of Reconciliation and Congress of Racial Equality—organizations whose dynamic political activities in the mid-twentieth century often are not popularized in the vein of organizations like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in our historical imagination today.
In 1958, the Reverend Lawson continued to buoy the nonviolent crusade by organizing seminars for the Nashville Christian Leadership Council. He facilitated sessions at Vanderbilt University, attended by future civil rights pioneers like Diane Nash, John Lewis, and Marion Barry. As a radical democratic educator, Lawson believed these colloquia were essential for persuasively and candidly describing nonviolent protest’s needs, demands, stakes, and contours to interested parties who wanted to defy and ultimately eliminate the segregationist regime with proven methods. SNCC worker Bernard Lafayette—affectionately known as “Little Gandhi”— reflected that Lawson helped him understand the “strength of suffering,” and his moral character was augmented by embracing those teachings in protest (Lafayette 2013, 37). Thus, these students centered dramatic nonviolent protest in various fora, ranging from sit-ins in myriad dining facilities to conventional protests in public demonstrations. Indeed, while the students understood the pragmatic utility of nonviolent protests, like Lawson, they were also driven by nonviolence’s spiritual power and moral imaginations as a stimulant for reforming the American constituency through a politics of shame. Consequently, these students disrupted the southern political stage. They upended the “fallow years” of the civil rights movement—periodized by the lack of sustained socio-drama by organizations in the struggle—with nonviolent demonstrations that transfixed the nation with harrowing images of incorruptible students patiently requesting service at dining establishments, only to be met with abject humiliation, crushing blows, unforgiving profanity, and vituperative rage from White patrons—making Black life grievable.
Lawson’s teachings left such a striking impression that the burgeoning Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee invited him to help craft their founding statement, which argued, “Nonviolence, as it grows from Judaic-Christian traditions, seeks a social order of justice permeated by love. Integration of human endeavor represents the crucial first steps towards such a society. Through nonviolence, courage displaces fear; love transforms hate.” Through his commendation of the students’ deployment of nonviolence, Lawson appealed to nonviolent student protest as one of the only politically solvent and morally correct ways to deal with Jim Crow’s moral and spiritual decadence. Reverend Lawson directly contributed to SNCC’s ideological architecture by modeling an organizing practice that sought to democratize the movement by centering ordinary citizens as nonviolent practitioners in diverse ways ranging from participation in the oft-cited “Freedom Rides” to organizing in “Freedom Summer” throughout the Deep South.
While the Reverend Lawson’s exhaustive resume of activism is not reflected in this short reflection, I contend that Reverend Lawson’s moral clarity concerning nonviolence and his relative obscurity offer important theoretical cues for social justice advocates to consider in their organizing. Regarding nonviolence, the Reverend Lawson’s political thought directs activists to consider nonviolence not merely as a performance but as a pedagogy. Decades after the long civil rights movement, the Reverend Lawson continued to hold workshops on nonviolence and civil disobedience because he still recognized its transformative and transcendental value. Contemporaneously, like Lawson, activists should teach nonviolence in robust and capacious ways that highlight its moral elegance and transformative dimensions for practitioners and spectators while amplifying its centrality in a genealogy of radical Black politics. The Reverend Lawson was not a celebrated charismatic figure like Dr. King, who monopolized the political oxygen of the long civil rights movement and (implicitly) tethered its political legitimacy to his messianic consciousness. Akin to Ella Baker, Reverend Lawson—at his core—was a missionary and teacher. Movements need more activists to assume unglorified pedagogical roles that can help spur and guide the political enlightenment of oppressed constituencies by providing opportunities for ordinary citizens to chart their destinies by becoming political agents.
