Reverend James Lawson was studying theology at Oberlin College
in Ohio when Martin Luther King Jr. came to the school in February
1957, urging him to move south and help lead the Civil Rights
Movement.
“I said to him … I had thought that I might one day work
in the South; that was still on my mind,” Lawson said Monday,
the Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday. “He quietly said
to me, looking me straight in the eye, “˜Don’t wait.
Come now. We need you now.'”
Now in his mid-70s, Lawson is a retired methodist minister and a
guest professor of a course titled “Nonviolence and Social
Movements” at UCLA. Shortly after leaving Oberlin College, he
moved to Nashville, Tenn., and helped lead the desegregation sit-in
movement there.
“There was no one with my background with the field of
Christianity and nonviolence. I told (King) then I (would) come as
soon as I can,” Lawson said.
Before he moved to Nashville, Lawson studied nonviolence in
India as a Methodist missionary. Lawson first heard of King when he
was in his late 20s in December 1955, when the Montgomery Bus
Boycott made the front pages of newspapers in India, he said.
Lawson moved to Nashville in 1958 as the southern secretary for
the Fellowship of the Reconciliation, an interfaith peace
organization, and joined the Nashville Christian Leadership Council
as a way to begin networking for action.
A year later, he began a series of workshops on nonviolence,
meeting every Saturday for three months. The workshops on
nonviolence turned into workshops for civil rights action, and the
group decided to focus on desegregating downtown Nashville.
“All through downtown, you had signs over drinking
fountains that said white, colored. And you had such signs in the
public buildings and the banks. … You had these signs in so many
places,” Lawson said.
After around two years of a relentless movement, including
economic boycotts of downtown Nashville and persistent acts of
civil disobedience, Lawson and civil rights advocates achieved
desegregation in many parts of downtown Nashville.
“At the time, he was often feared and hated by our
political leadership, just as Martin Luther King Jr. was, and many
social justice leaders are today as well,” said Matt Leber,
director of the Nashville Peace and Justice Center.
Lawson and King kept in contact and worked together in the Civil
Rights Movement until King was assassinated in 1968. In the early
1970s Lawson moved to Los Angeles as the pastor of Holman Methodist
Church and began teaching at UCLA in conjunction with the Labor
Center in 2000, he said.
Lawson said his course on nonviolent social movements is
designed to show students how and why nonviolence is an effective
strategy for social change.
“I’m not making people read a lot of documents about
nonviolence. It is more of a socio-political survey about movements
that were effective in different ways. It is not exactly a
theoretical exposition; it’s a practical (one),” Lawson
said. “I’m wanting (students) to see the efficacy of
nonviolence ““ why it is practical, why violence is
impractical.”
Jennifer Mosley, a social welfare graduate student and teaching
assistant in Lawson’s class, said the course will likely be
taught again this spring.
“It’s an incredible opportunity for students at UCLA
to have access to have someone like Reverend Lawson. … It
doesn’t come along every day someone has both the
intellectual rigor and the personal and professional involvement
(like Lawson),” Mosley said.
Many students come into the class questioning nonviolence as a
viable strategy because they have been disillusioned by what they
see in the world and often feel very powerless to make change. It
is interesting to see them begin to change their thinking over the
length of the course, Mosley said.
“We need more Jim Lawsons today,” Leber said.
“We still live in a city, a state and a country where racism
is still in full effect. People like Reverend Lawson are needed now
more than ever.”