Chapter Eternal: Rev. James Lawson – Activist, professor, and key figure in the Civil Rights Movement

James M. Lawson, Jr. (Baldwin Wallace ’51), a minister and key activist in the Civil Rights Movement, passed into the Chapter Eternal in 2024. Lawson studied sociology at Baldwin Wallace and joined Beta Sigma Tau Fraternity, which later merged with Pi Lambda Phi in 1960. 

Fostering peaceful protest

Following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, Lawson became a Methodist minister and after graduation, he traveled to India to become a missionary. There he studied nonviolent resistance developed by Gandhi and his followers. 

When he returned home as a graduate student in 1956, he was introduced to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who also embraced nonviolent resistance. Dr. King convinced him to move to the south to teach civil rights activists the principles of peaceful protest. 

Lawson began divinity studies at Vanderbilt University, but was expelled for organizing lunch counter sit-ins and other nonviolent protests in 1960. He would also suffer arrests, beatings and other indignities as a protester, and one of the earliest Freedom Riders. But he never wavered.

Lawson said in an interview with the Fellowship of Reconciliation,

“I came to recognize that walking the extra mile, turning the other cheek, praying for the enemy, and seeing the enemy as a fellow human being was a resistance movement.”

He continued to play a leading role in the March on Washington, Freedom Summer, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, the 1965 Selma Voting Rights Movement, the Chicago Freedom Movement, and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement.

Key strategist in the Civil Rights Movement

Lawson was a leader in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and a key advisor to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who called him “the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world.”

He was also an early mentor to the late civil rights leader and Congressman John Lewis, who called Lawson the “architect of the nonviolent movement in America.” Lawson was among the speakers at Lewis’ 2020 funeral.

Continuing the legacy of equality

Lawson moved to Los Angeles in 1974, where he was pastor of Holman United Methodist Church. He retired in 1999, but he never retired from fighting for civil rights, continuing to speak, teach and inspire young minds to act peacefully in favor of racial equality. 

John David Smith, Ph.D. (Baldwin Wallace ’71), Professor of American History at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, said of Lawson’s legacy,

“Jim Lawson belongs in the universe of outstanding Pi Lams who practiced our Creed in deed as well as in word, subjecting himself to all manner of harassment and prison terms in the cause of racial and social justice. He has long deserved recognition for his leadership in the country’s civil rights crusade, including providing a theoretical base for Dr. Martin Luther King’s ethic of nonviolence and peaceful protest to challenge segregation and racial violence.”