While nowhere near as famous as Martin Luther King Jr, James Lawson was one of the most important leaders of the US civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Indeed, until his death in June, he was, without a doubt, one of the greatest living practitioners of radical nonviolence anywhere in the world.
As a young man, Michael Honey notes in his introduction, Lawson ‘didn’t expect to live to age forty.’
Committed to a ‘radical overturning of the systems that hurt and cripple people’, through ‘an aggressive engagement to apply a style of life tempered in love’, Lawson was maced and shot at, and repeatedly threatened and arrested.
Born in 1928, Lawson’s path to radical nonviolence began with a childhood epiphany, after he struck another child who had racially abused him.
When he told his mother what had happened, she reaffirmed him as a person but questioned his use of violence. ‘And what good did that do, Jimmy?’ she asked. Thus began, Lawson later explained, ‘a personal experiment with love… a resolve deep inside me that I would never hit out at people when I got angry, that I would find other ways to challenge them.’
As a teenager, he ‘refused to accede to segregation in public places’, conducting his first sit-in (at a youth conference in Indianapolis) while still a junior in high school.
In 1950, Lawson was sentenced to three years in prison for resisting the draft for the Korean War. As a minister and a student, he could easily have avoided prison by applying for an exemption, but instead chose the path of active resistance.
After his release, Lawson travelled to India to learn more about Gandhian nonviolence.
In 1957, not long after the successful conclusion of the Montgomery bus boycott (which ended racial segregation on the buses in Montgomery, Alabama), Lawson met King, who urged him to join the freedom struggle: ‘Don’t wait, come now.’
Lawson did, beginning a period of collaboration with King which lasted until the latter’s death in 1968.
Moving to Nashville as a representative of the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, Lawson worked on supporting the Little Rock Nine: nine African-American students who were the first to enrol in the previously-segregated Little Rock central high school.
Initially prevented from attending by enraged mobs, the Nine ended up having to endure constant physical, verbal and psychological abuse from their white peers.
From January through May 1958, Lawson held a series of nonviolence workshops in Little Rock, which at one point were attended by over 100 people, including ‘white students, parents and some administrators who supported [the Nine], as well as other African American students who were seeking admission to the high school’.
In September 1958, Lawson began holding regular Saturday meetings ‘with an intergenerational group of community members who were determined to desegregate downtown Nashville.’
Among those who took part were Marion Barry, James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, John Lewis, Diane Nash, and CT Vivian – all of whom would later become significant leaders in the civil rights movement.
Their long-planned Nashville sit-in campaign was eventually launched in February 1960 – after a small group of students in North Carolina pre-empted them with their own sit-in.
By the end of the spring, the sit-in movement had reached across the entire South. According to one estimate, some 50,000 people took part.
The Nashville campaign resulted in the official desegregation of downtown lunch counters (in May 1960) as well Lawson’s expulsion from Vanderbilt University.
However, the broader campaign to desegregate Nashville ‘continued for almost ten years with campaign after campaign’, in what Lawson, speaking in 2008, describes as ‘an unknown story’.
Lawson also helped to found the now-legendary Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, pronounced ‘snick’). He also played an important role in the Freedom Rides, even holding ‘a workshop on nonviolence inside one of the buses after it was attacked in Montgomery’.
In 1965, Lawson took part in a peace-seeking mission to Vietnam and Southeast Asia on King’s behalf.
In 1968, Lawson played a pivotal leadership role in the historic strike by Memphis sanitation workers, linking civil rights to economic justice.
And, in 1974, he moved to Los Angeles, where he ‘helped to build one of the strongest organised labour and immigrant rights movements in the United States today.’
Opening with a foreword by Angela Davis and concluding with a brief biographical sketch by Kent Wong, the bulk of this slender book consists of two interviews with Lawson from 2020 and four edited talks dating from 2008.
The latter explore violence and nonviolence, the history of nonviolent social change, and Lawson’s four-step model of nonviolent protest.
According to Lawson, though we are ‘still neophytes’ (beginners) in applying it, ‘the introduction of nonviolent struggle with that language [the conscious practice of “nonviolent struggle”] is the most important invention out of the twentieth century leading into the twenty-first century.’
The practice of nonviolence has a much longer history, of course. For example, Lawson points to the 75 years that the Quakers were in charge of the Pennsylvania colony, which was granted its charter in 1681. According to Lawson, there were ‘no killings or wars between the Indigenous people and the settlers’ during this period, ‘one of the finest stories in human history.’
Because of its source material – and even though it is quite short – this book contains a good deal of repetition, with Lawson delivering a prophetic, broad-brush analysis (‘It is now the military and the huge private profiteering industry of war that runs the Congress and the White House’).
More in-depth treatments can, of course, be found elsewhere. Indeed, Lawson explicitly recommends Ackerman and DuVall’s excellent A Force More Powerful: A Century of Nonviolent Conflict.
Nonetheless, this book contains some shrewd assessments and some good advice.
Consider, for example, Lawson’s 2008 assertion that, had the AFL-CIO (the largest federation of trade unions in the US) ‘spent the money that [they’ve] given to the Democratic Party over the last twenty years to organise Los Angeles instead… in a hundred cities across the United States, George W. Bush and other right-wing candidates would never have had a chance’.
Likewise, Lawson’s suggestion to ‘begin where you are’: ‘investigate, research, build a little community, and then adopt specific tasks that you are willing to accomplish. I think that's the way to go.’
Lawson’s four step model of nonviolent protest (‘Focus’, ‘Negotiate’, ‘Direct action campaign’, ‘Follow-up’) is nothing to get too excited about.
For me, the book’s biggest take-away was probably the emphasis Lawson places on the initial step: deciding on a focus and preparing participants for the struggle.
Indeed, according to Lawson – whose own life-experience clearly bears this out – this ‘may be the crucial step for making the rest of the effort effective.… I would like to move on fifty different issues.… But to start a movement, you have to give up on that and go after a single effort together. That’s part of what focus is about. When that happens, you accomplish much more than with sporadically running from place to place.’
Having read about Lawson, I was eager to read this book. But I was also not surprised to be somewhat underwhelmed by its contents.
After all, there have been many more brilliant practitioners of nonviolence than there have been brilliant writers and thinkers on the topic (think of the deathly-dull writings of Gene Sharp).
So, by all means, read this book, but I would also strongly recommend that you get hold of a copy of Michael Honey’s magisterial account of the Memphis strike, Going Down Jericho Road, where Lawson can be seen in his true element: actively involved in nonviolent struggle against injustice.