James Lawson (activist)

James Morris Lawson Jr. (born September 22, 1928) is an American activist and university professor.

He was a leading theoretician and tactician of nonviolence within the Civil Rights Movement.

Lawson was born to Philane May Cover and James Morris Lawson Sr. on September 22, 1928, in Uniontown, Pennsylvania.

He was the sixth out of nine children.

He grew up in Massillon, Ohio.

Both Lawson's father and grandfather were Methodist ministers.

Lawson received his ministry license in 1947 during his senior year of high school.

While a freshman at Baldwin Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, he studied sociology.

Because of his refusal to serve in the US military when drafted, he was convicted of draft evasion and sentenced to two years in prison.

He served 13 months of his sentence and returned to college, finishing his degree.

He joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), an organization led by A. J. Muste, and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), an organization affiliated with FOR.

Both FOR and CORE advocated nonviolent resistance to racism.

He went as a Methodist missionary to Nagpur, India, where he studied satyagraha, a form of nonviolence resistance developed by Mohandas Gandhi and his followers.

He returned to the United States in 1956, entering the Graduate School of Theology at Oberlin College in Ohio.

One of his Oberlin professors introduced him to Martin Luther King Jr. who had also embraced Gandhi's principles of nonviolent resistance.

Lawson studied at Oberlin College from 1956 to 1957 and after being there for a year, he married Dorothy Wood and had three sons.

In 1957, King urged Lawson to move to the south telling him, "Come now. We don't have anyone like you down there."

He moved to Nashville, where he attended Vanderbilt University and began teaching nonviolent protest techniques.

He attended Vanderbilt from 1958 to 1960.

Lawson moved to Nashville, Tennessee, and enrolled at the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University, where he served as the southern director for CORE and began conducting nonviolence training workshops for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in a church basement in 1958.

While in Nashville, he met and mentored a number of young students at Vanderbilt, Fisk University, and other area schools in the tactics of nonviolent direct action.

In Nashville, he trained many of the future leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, among them Diane Nash, James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, Marion Barry, and John Lewis.

In 1959 and 1960, they and other Lawson-trained activists launched the Nashville sit-ins to challenge segregation in downtown stores.

During the 1960s, he served as a mentor to the Nashville Student Movement and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

He was expelled from Vanderbilt University for his civil rights activism in 1960, and later served as a pastor in Los Angeles for 25 years.

Lawson was expelled from Vanderbilt in March 1960 for civil rights arrests, but received his S.T.B from Boston University that same year.

Lawson received a post as pastor of the Scott Church in Shelbyville, Tennessee.

In February 1960, following the lunch sit-ins by students at the Woolworth's stores in Greensboro, North Carolina, Lawson and several others were arrested.

Their actions led to desegregation of some lunch counters.

Lawson was expelled from Vanderbilt due to his participation in these activities.

James Geddes Stahlman, the publisher of the Nashville Banner who served on the university's board of trust, published misleading stories that led to his expulsion.

Another trustee, John Sloan, the president of Cain-Sloan, supported Stahlman's suggestion to expel him.

Under the intense pressure, Chancellor Harvie Branscomb enforced the decision.

Branscomb later re-examined that action, regretting he did not consider referring the matter to a committee to delay action for three months until Lawson's graduation.

In 1962, Lawson brought King and Bevel together for a meeting that resulted in the two agreeing to work together as equals.

Bevel was then named SCLC's Director of Direct Action and Director of Nonviolent Education.

Lawson's students played a leading role in the Open Theater Movement, the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, Freedom Summer, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the Children's Crusade in Birmingham, the 1965 Selma Voting Rights Movement, the Chicago Freedom Movement, and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement over the next few years.

During the 2006 graduation ceremony, Vanderbilt apologized for its treatment of Lawson.

Lawson returned to teach at Vanderbilt as a Distinguished Professor from 2006 to 2009.

He donated his papers in 2013.