Passing the Torch : King Colleague and SCLC Leader Recalls Civil Rights Struggle

The Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., once a colleague of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and now known as the spiritual leader of social justice struggles in Los Angeles, tells the story of his first encounter with nonviolence as vividly as if he were still 9 or 10 years old in the 1930s: running an errand, walking past a car, hearing a white child inside call out a racial epithet.

“I went over there to the open window of the car, smacked the child, and went on to do my errand,” Lawson said.

Then he ran back home, where his mother was working at the stove, and told her what had happened. Without turning around, she said: “What good did that do, Jimmy?”

The boy had been admonished before for getting into scraps, but this time the logic of striking back seemed to inexplicably crumble, launching Lawson on what would become his “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.”

That search would change his life and the course of U.S. history.

Lawson became the Gandhian mentor of the civil rights movement and later president of the Los Angeles chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization founded by King to end racial segregation by nonviolent protest.

Now, after 14 years, the white-haired, scholar-activist-minister is stepping down as SCLC president. Tonight, he will preside over his last SCLC Martin Luther King birthday dinner.

Lawson, 64, pastor of Holman United Methodist Church in the West Adams district for 18 years, has marched against apartheid, gone to jail dozens of times in protests against government-sponsored violence in El Salvador, and spoken out against the Gulf War. As relations between the city’s ethnic communities have become increasingly fractious, he has been a dogged coalition builder, bringing together African-Americans with Jews and Korean-Americans, black ministers with Muslims.

“We are a very racist and insulated society, but the realism of our time does not permit our being disheartened with coalitions,” he said. “I don’t see going it alone as a viable option for change in America.”

Lawson is best understood as the human bridge connecting “the (civil rights) movement of the 1950s and ‘60s with the struggles of the 1970s and ‘80s,” said City Councilman Mark Ridley-Thomas, a former SCLC executive director who worked with Lawson for 12 years. “His presence (at SCLC) was a constant reminder of an unrelenting commitment to nonviolence,” Ridley-Thomas said.

Last summer, the Rev. Richard Horton, who is succeeding Lawson as SCLC president, lost his 21-year-old daughter, Kimberly, to gang violence. Lawson proposed organizing a candlelight vigil at the site of the slaying.

That vigil last August, and the nearly 30 SCLC vigils that followed, was a response not only to specific incidents of crime, but an effort to stand up to the rising tide of violence in the community, Lawson said.

“We see ourselves trying to educate people about the many faces of violence . . . its outer manifestations and its inner manifestations,” Lawson said. “We think poverty is a form of economic violence. The poverty of people who work long hours and sometimes six or seven days a week. Racism and sexism are both inner manifestations of violence in that both depreciate and violate the sanctity of human life. “

Joe R. Hicks, executive director of the local SCLC, described Lawson as a man “who embodies the kind of challenge Dr. King issued to the black church, and that was to become political, to become active. In his work as a minister, he takes that challenge very seriously. His politics transcend racial or sexual barriers and marks him as an extremely progressive minister.”

The son of a Methodist minister who was known to carry a gun when he went preaching in the South, James M. Lawson Jr. was born in Union Town, Penn., on Sept. 22, 1928, and grew up in Massillon, Ohio.

In the late 1940s, a decade before the mass lunch counter sit-ins in the South, a teen-age Lawson organized sit-ins at Massillon restaurants that refused to serve blacks. As a college student, he read Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiography, became a follower of A.J. Muste, a man he described as the leading nonviolence theorist in the country at the time, and spent a year in prison for refusing to serve when drafted into the Army.

“By the time I read Gandhi, I was already convinced that my personal experiment with love was valid,” he said. “He gave me his reasoned and principled understanding of nonviolence. . . . I learned that what Gandhi did was very important to black people in this country. I learned about other people, including black clergy, who were in that train of thought.”

By age 20, Lawson was speaking out against the Cold War and had been branded a communist by the editor of his hometown paper.

“I was on a journey of faith, of truth-seeking,” Lawson said. “I was trying to understand the meaning of love for life. And here he was calling me a dirty name!”

When Lawson first met King in 1957, “the affinity between them was such that they could almost anticipate each other even while first getting acquainted,” wrote Taylor Branch in his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1954-63.”

“In many respects, Lawson was ahead of King as an activist, but King had already realized Lawson’s dream of starting a nonviolent mass movement,” Branch wrote.

Lawson remembers the fateful meeting as one between brothers: Both were sons of preachers, both were in their late 20s, both had met the same political thinkers and read the same books.

“I told him I wanted to work in the South and that I was waiting for the right time,” Lawson recounted. “He said: ‘This is the right time. Come now. We don’t have a person with your experience in nonviolence.”’

Lawson headed to Nashville that year. His assignment: to teach nonviolence to budding civil rights activists.

“Often it was with Martin King or (Ralph) Abernathy,” Lawson said. “They would make the major presentation at the night meeting and I would do the actual training during the day.”

By the late 1950s, Lawson had mastered the subtle mechanics of nonviolence. Branch described a Nashville training session where 500 new volunteers had come to join the lunch counter sit-ins:

Lawson “told the crowd how to behave in the face of a hundred possible emergencies, how to avoid violating the loitering laws, how to move to and from the lunch counters in orderly shifts, how to fill the seats of students who needed to go to the bathroom, even how to dress: stockings and heels for the women, coats and ties for the fellows.”

For more than 10 years, Lawson was among King’s closest--and one of the most radical--advisers. He led the first cadre of Freedom Riders, prepared thousands of students to be dragged by policemen from restaurants and pelted by angry whites, and counseled them in jail. He worked at King’s side until 1968, when he invited King to help striking garbage workers in Memphis, where the civil rights leader was slain.

Today, it pains him to see how King’s message of nonviolence has been diluted.

“This country did not understand Martin King or Gandhi . . . all because of its inhumanity,” Lawson said. “I have great fears about the future of this country. If a better spirit does not develop among the white leadership, they are going to carry this country through a path of great, great suffering and this country is going to collapse.”

He is critical of activists who have abandoned efforts to build social movements and spend their energy on winning political office. But he insists that this is no time to be disheartened.

“I’ve seen what the obstacles are,” he said. “Obstacles are things to be overcome. They are not barriers.”