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On a sad day, as we remembered the life and legacy of John Lewis and he crossed over, I was heartened to see so much interest in and praise for the Rev. James M. Lawson, Jr.’s eulogy. Rev. Lawson introduced John Lewis to the long history of nonviolence as a political philosophy.
As Lewis wrote in his stunning autobiography, Lawson’s trainings in Nashville “turned my world around...Jim Lawson knew--though we had no idea when we began--that we were being trained for a war unlike any this nation had seen up to this time, a nonviolent struggle that...
would force this nation to face it’s conscience.” See John Lewis, Walking with the Wind, pp. 70 and 78.
There has been far too little written about Rev. Lawson, but I have spent the better part of the last ten years trying to understand his impact on people in the movement and on the nation more broadly.
As a senior in college, I wrote an honors thesis focused exclusively on Lawson. As we all do, it seems, my thinking has shifted over time. I no longer use the word ‘protest’ to characterize how Lawson envisioned nonviolence.
I settled instead on the word ‘demonstration’ as it was much more common in the original sources. And, maybe more importantly, it spoke more directly to what Lawson and the students with whom he worked sought to do: demonstrate the world as it should be.
While I have revised much of my thinking since writing this back in 2009, this essay is a nice introduction to Lawson and his life before the movement. https://dlynx.rhodes.edu/jspui/handle/10267/7416
More recently, I wrote a few pieces that may be of interest. This paper examines his the nonviolent philosophy that Lawson taught across the South and Midwest in the late 1950s. https://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/available/etd-03232015-130857/unrestricted/Siracusa.pdf
This piece from the Southwest TN Historical Society papers grapples with the influence of Jain religious ideas on Lawson. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0By9IZdP3IUsLRVpXQkU1R0RlV1E/view?usp=drivesdk
This piece in an excellent edited volume about Memphis complicates our understanding of the relationship between advocates of nonviolence and Black Power activists in Memphis in 1968. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt2111h1m
Fingers crossed that the book - Nonviolence Before King: The Politics of Being and the Black Freedom Struggle, will be out in the spring of 2021 from @uncpressblog.
The concluding chapter suggests that Lawson brought together decades of ideas and experimentation in a novel and deeply impactful way by 1960, but it shows also that he inherited and built on an incredible legacy of ideas and action.
We lost C.T. Vivian and John Lewis this past week, but at 90 years young Lawson continues to work for the world as it should be. He is an inspiration to me, as is his SNCC co-founder Ella Baker and so many others. I give thanks for his life and witness in this moment
One other piece from me Lawson’s time in Memphis between 1962 and 1968, and a couple other inportant sources on Lawson. https://dlynx.rhodes.edu/jspui/handle/10267/23957
An awesome piece from my advisor Dr. Dennis Dickerson http://archives.gcah.org/bitstream/handle/10516/9600/Methodist-History-2014-04-Dickerson.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y
And a piece from Natalya Cherry in Methodist History. https://www.academia.edu/31754586/JAMES_M._LAWSON_JR._CALLED_BY_KING_THE_GREATEST_TEACHER_OF_NONVIOLENCE_IN_AMERICA_METHODIST_HISTORY_April_2016_Volume_IV_Number_3_?email_work_card=title
