James Lawson Jr.

James Morris Lawson Jr. was born on the twenty-second of September 1928 in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, the son of James Morris Lawson Sr., a Methodist Episcopal minister, in a line where both his father and grandfather answered the call to preach. Though born in Pennsylvania, he was raised in Massillon, Ohio, one of many children in a household where faith and moral courage were woven together from the first.

As a young man Lawson embraced Christian pacifism, refusing induction during the Korean War and serving time in federal prison for his conscience. He then traveled to India as a Methodist missionary, where he studied Mohandas Gandhi's satyagraha at its source. Returning home carrying that discipline, he settled in Nashville in 1957 and enrolled at Vanderbilt University's Divinity School, from which he would be expelled in 1960 for his activism.

In a Nashville church basement, beginning in 1959, Lawson led the workshops that forged a generation. He trained the students who became the heart of the Nashville sit-in movement and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, among them Diane Nash, John Lewis, James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, and Marion Barry, and he helped shape the strategy of the 1961 Freedom Rides. He delivered the keynote at SNCC's founding meeting and drafted its Statement of Purpose. Martin Luther King Jr. called him "the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world."

For decades afterward he pastored congregations in Memphis and Los Angeles and taught nonviolence to new generations until his death on the ninth of June 2024. He gave his life to the conviction that love disciplined into action could remake the world. May the honored ancestor James Lawson Jr. rest in the peace he taught others to build.