James Lawson, towering Civil Rights activist and pioneer in nonviolent protest, dies at 95 (2024)

Lawson, an architect of Nashville's lunch counter sit-ins, helped launch a nationwide movement

The Rev. James Lawson, the man who inspired a generation of nonviolent activists in the earliest days of the Civil Rights Movement and helped organize the push to desegregate lunch counters in Nashville, died on Sunday. He was 95.

Minister, professor, activist and descendant of enslaved family members, Lawson lived out the principles of nonviolent activism in the face of violence and turmoil.

The Rev. Christian Washington of the Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles, where Lawson pastored from 1977 to 1999 and later served as pastor emeritus, confirmed his death to The Tennessean on Monday.

Lawson learned from Mohandas Gandhiand marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., but it may have been the words of his mother that changed Lawson the most. She asked what good it would do it hit someone who had used racist language to describe him.

"His passing before Juneteenth is a reminder that our nation’s journey from slavery to freedom started in the hearts of people like James Lawson spellbound by freedom," President Joe Biden said in a statement Tuesday.

Imprisoned as a conscientious objector during the Korean War in the early 1950s, Lawson was also kicked out of Vanderbilt University and arrested for organizing student demonstrations. During his incarceration, he said he learned about the nonviolent protests led by Gandhiin India.

Lawson was an American civil rights icon who worked alongside luminaries like King, Diane Nash, John Lewis and C.T. Vivian to promote nonviolent activism in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Shortly after Lawson and King first met, King encouraged Lawson to travel South to have a greater impact in the Civil Rights Movement. Lawson transferred to Vanderbilt University, where he was one of just a few Black students.

In 1959, Lawson began leading workshops in nonviolence for young Black students from local Nashville colleges. Among his pupils were students who would soon rise to prominence across the nation — Lewis, Nash, Bernard Lafayette and others.

The lessons were both philosophical and physical in scope, with Lawson teaching the gathered activists both the principles and practicalities of resisting violent oppression without lashing out.

Some were initially skeptical of the tactics, which were considered radical at the time,though they've now become synonymous with the Civil Rights Movement. In a 1985 interview, Nash recalled Lawson putting students through intensive roleplays, where they would practice sitting at a pretend lunch counter and protecting their heads from a severe beating.

They would practice not striking back when they were hit, or putting their bodies between an assailant and a fellow protestor.

"There were many things that I learned in those workshops, that I not only was able to put into practice at the time that we were demonstrating and so forth, but that I have used for the rest of my life, that have been invaluable in shaping the kind of person I've become," Nash said in the 1985 documentary.

Nash and the others would soon put Lawson's lessons into practice, organizing lunch counter sit-ins in Nashville. As the movement progressed in Nashville, Vanderbilt expelled Lawson in 1960 for his role.

In 1960, Lawson drafted the first purpose statement for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, an organization led by Nashville students that would dramatically alter the landscape of the movement in the years to come. When SNCC members took up the mantle of the Freedom Rides in 1961, Lawson was arrested and held in a Mississippi prison for weeks.

Lawson was working on the sanitation strike in Memphis in 1968 and called King to participate.

In-depth: Civil rights advocate James Lawson was rooted in faith

Lawson was then one of the leaders of the silent march to honor King in Memphis after he was assassinated.

'People should be treated equally and justly'

Lawson told The Tennessean in 2013 he felt Jesus’ call to do something.

“The politics of Jesus and the politics of God are that people should be fed, that people have access to life, that people should be treated equally and justly,” Lawson said. “Especially the marginalized. The poor, the illiterate, the jailed, the hungry, the naked — those are all terms Jesus uses. The alien, the stranger, the foreigner, you’re supposed to treat them as you do yourself.”

He looked to the gospel account of Mark, the story of Jesus healing a demon-possessed man. When the city’s residents saw the man was better, they were terrified.

“When all kinds of people in the United States become human, the people who have been mistreating them as less than human then are fearful,” Lawson said. “That’s the issue of racism in the United States, sexism in the United States, violence in the United States."

He was the son of a minister and raised among 10 brothers and sisters in Massillon, Ohio.

When he was younger, Lawson would punch people who called him racist names. But then he told his mother, Philane Lawson, what he had done.

“What good did that do, Jimmy?” she asked.

That simple question helped set her son on a new path. “I made decisions that changed my life forever and basically directed me toward nonviolence,” Lawson said.

Seven Days of 1961 Police violence ‘enforced white supremacy’ during 1960s protests. Similar tactics are still used today

Lawson coached a movement

From Nashville to Memphis and beyond, residents honored Lawson's legacy and pointed to the progress he helped foster, even while noting the work yet to do.

"The world has lost an irreplaceably powerful leader in the fight for social justice," Metro Nashville Council member Joy Styles said. "We owe Rev. Lawson a debt of gratitude for how he led change for the world that we live in."

Metro Nashville At-Large Council Member Zulfat Suara said he was a "testament of the struggle for African-Americans in this country and a reminder of all the work, still to be done."

House Minority Leader Karen Camper, D-Memphis, said his life was intertwined with some of the "most important moments in Tennessee history and his level of commitment never wavered over his lifetime."

"And yet, he always remained humble and gracious," Camper said.

For Nashville native Howard Gentry — longtime elected official and the city’s only Black vice mayor — Lawson humanized and personified nonviolent protest.

“I was an angry Black kid for the way I was mistreated; when I was a teenager, segregation was still rampant,” Gentry, 72, said.

“I played football and I loved to hit. But to hear Jim Lawson say to not fight fire with fire? He was not a soft person. He was a tough guy. But in his toughness, he would tell you not to fight back and to love and to meet violence with nonviolence.

“It took more courage for people like Jim Lawson to be nonviolent then it did to fight,” he said.

Nashville historian David Ewing said Lawson not only changed Nashville history but history nationwide.

“Lawson taught students like John Lewis and Diane Nash nonviolent responses. The reason the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins were so successful was because they were peaceful,” Ewing said.

“Lawson was the coach of the lunch counter sit-ins. He mentored the students, came up with strategy and later cheered everyone on like John Lewis and Diane Nash.”

Ewing said Lawson came to study at Vanderbilt University’s divinity school at the urging of King. Lawson was the divinity school’s first Black student accepted, until he got expelled for helping with lunch counter protests.

Vanderbilt University began to make that right in 2006 when then-university president Gordon Gee brought Lawson back as a divinity school professor, Ewing said. About three years ago, the university also purchased Lawson’s writings and photographs.

In 2021, Vanderbilt launched the James Lawson Institute for the Research and Study of Nonviolent Movements.

Current Vanderbilt University Chancellor Daniel Diermeier called Lawson a hero and a "passionate advocate for justice and a more perfect union." "Without his spiritual guidance, moral example and deep understanding of the principles and practices of non-violent protest, the civil rights movement as we know it might not have existed," Diermeier said in a statement.

"He entreated us to engage with one another with love, not hate," Diermeier said. "And in a time of deep polarization, he showed us how to cherish our common humanity."

In Nashville most recently, Lawson's name was given to a Bellevue high school in 2023. The $124 million facility has 1,600 students and 150 staff and faculty.

And back in Los Angeles, where he remained active for decades, the city in January dedicated a one-mile stretch of Adams Boulevard in front of Holman United Methodist Church in his honor.

“Up until a few months ago he was still doing nonviolent protest seminars, well into his 90s,” Washington said.