Civil Rights Figure James Lawson to Speak on Campus

UNIVERSITY NEWS | “I marched with Martin Luther King Jr.”

It is not so much a boast as it is an assertion of integrity and real-world civil rights authenticity. The expression, too often used speciously by politicians, is a link to one of America’s most courageous figures.

Rev. James Lawson marched with MLK Jr. At 90 years old, Lawson is still a first-person connection to the civil rights movement’s most active period. He will be the featured speaker at Loyola Marymount University’s Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Interfaith Prayer Breakfast, on Jan. 24, 2019, at 10 a.m. in St. Robert’s Auditorium.

“Lawson is the quintessence of American courage and ethics,” said Stefan Bradley, professor and chair of LMU African American Studies. “His ability to use nonviolence as a medium for freedom is the stuff that other cultures would refer to as legend. He personifies all that is the mission of LMU.”

This year’s theme, “All We Say to America Is Be True to What You Said on Paper,” is a quote from King’s “I Have A Dream” speech delivered on Aug. 28, 1963 and his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech, delivered on April 3, 1968 in Memphis, Tennessee, the night before he was assassinated.

King called Lawson “the greatest teacher of nonviolence in America,” according to Biography.com. Diane Nash, an influential civil rights leader and strategist for students, including the lunch counter sit-ins in Tennessee, learned about nonviolent protest from Lawson, and once said of him, “I think his impact was fundamental and tremendous. I think that he, more than anyone else really, is why the civil rights movement was nonviolent.”

Lawson grasped faster than almost any other American practitioner how lessons from Mahatma Gandhi’s struggles and other campaigns of civil resistance, became necessary in the United States, according to the website of the James Lawson Institute. He was a conscientious objector during the Korean War, serving 13 months in prison. When he was released, the United Methodist Church’s Board of Missions sent him to teach in India. He spent three years teaching at Hislop College in Nagpur in Maharashtra, also meeting individuals who had worked alongside Gandhi in various struggles, thereby gaining practical knowledge from firsthand participants. He was the first to grasp the applicability of the Indian struggles to the American context, and he was the most methodical in applying those lessons to the U.S. experience.

When he returned to the U.S., Lawson put his education, experience and convictions to work. Becoming southern field secretary for the Fellowship of Reconciliation, by January 1958 Lawson was based in Nashville, Tennessee, where the local movement had started a nonviolent direct-action campaign against racial discrimination in downtown stores and restaurants. By autumn 1959, Lawson had begun systematically introducing local clergy and student leaders to the theories and methods that he had analyzed in India in workshops that are among the prototypes for the James Lawson Institute. He was running weekly workshops to prepare students from all the city’s institutions of higher learning. This interracial group of students became the heart of the Nashville movement. Lawson was involved in the counter sit-ins in North Carolina, became the tutor for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee – SNCC – and helped strategize many civil rights protests throughout the South. He was a leading voice in the sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis in 1968, where MLK was killed.

“We are using our minds, hearts and bodies for others as the primary curriculum of his nonviolence schools,” Bradley said. “Lawson created freedom for America.”

“Rev. Lawson is a civil rights icon,” said Nathan Sessoms, director of LMU’s Office of Black Student Services. “We are extremely blessed to have him as this year’s keynote speaker. I look forward to his message, which is sure to both challenge and inspire the LMU Campus Community, as we work to become living examples of Dr. King’s message.”

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