Noted civil rights veteran, James Lawson, will participate in an ecumenical communion at Occupy Boston (Dewey Square) on Wednesday, October 26, 2011 at 5:30pm. Following the communion service, Dr. Lawson will be in conversation with Rev. Dr. Harvey Cox, Hollis Research Professor of Divinity, Harvard Divinity School. The dialogue will take place 7:15pm at The Cathedral of Saint Paul located 138 Tremont Street , Boston, MA 02111.
Rev. Dr. James Lawson is considered the architect of nonviolent civil disobedience during the Civil Rights movement. On the eve of his assassination, Martin Luther King called Lawson "the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world."
Dr. Lawson’s visit to Occupy Boston is sponsored by the Episcopal Diocese of Boston and the Cathedral of Saint Paul in partnership The Protest Chaplains, Theology Salon, and The Freedom Church in Cambridge, MA.
Prior to meeting Dr. King, Lawson was a seasoned practitioner of nonviolence. While a student at Baldwin Wallace College, he joined the Fellowship of Conciliation and its affiliate the Congress for Racial Equality. In 1951 refused the draft, declaring conscientious objector status, Lawson served fourteen months in prison. Upon his release from prison, Lawson went as a Methodist missionary to India. He studied Gandhian nonviolence and began to combine this thought with African American social protest and religious thought. Upon returning from India, Lawson enrolled in seminary. As a student at Oberlin School of Theology, Lawson was introduced to Dr. King by Rev. Dr. Harvey Cox. In their first meeting, Dr. King requested that Lawson come to the South because in King’s word: “there is no one like you” to train members of the emerging civil rights movement in nonviolence civil disobedience and philosophy.
Lawson obliged and moved to Nashville, TN. And enrolled in Vanderbilt Divinity School where he was eventually expelled for his activism. Rev. Dr. James Lawson mentored and trained many of the students of the civil rights movement that ended a century of Jim Crow laws in the American south. Lawson served the Director of Nonviolent Education for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Lawson mentored John Lewis, Bernard Layfette, Diane Nash and other students that created the Nashville sit-in movement. These students would go on to found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
James Lawson helped coordinate the Freedom Rides in 1961 and the Meredith March in 1966, and while working as a pastor at the Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis, played a major role in the sanitation workers strike of 1968. It was a Dr. Lawson request that Dr. King supported the Memphis Sanitation Workers. In 1974, Lawson moved to Los Angles to be the pastor of Holman Methodist Church until his retirement in 1999. Even after his retirement, Lawson was arrested protesting with the Janitors for Justice in Los Angeles, and with gay and lesbian Methodists in Cleveland. In 2006, Vanderbilt University, publicly, apologized for its treatment of Dr. Lawson, invited him back as a Visiting Professor and currently has an endowed chair named in his honor. He continues to teach the philosophy of nonviolence to social movements through the world.
