James Lawson, a black civil rights campaigner who traveled to India to experiment non-violent opposition and served as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s key strategist, passed away at the age of 95.
Lawson, a Methodist minister, was able to teach activists opposed to racial discrimination Gandhi’s rules of civil disobedience in the US.
In order to highlight the depravity of racism, he conducted workshops with many activists on how to passively avoid harrowing violence, threats from the police, and angry light mobs.
King constantly praised his methods, referring to him as one of the greatest “noble men” of the dark battle in America in a speech the day before his execution.
King even described his ally as the “leading theory and planner of nonviolence in the world ” when they met Lawson at the age of 28.
Lawson died in Los Angeles, where he lived, his household said on Monday.
The son and grandson of ministries, he was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, in 1928.
After slapping a child who had referred to him as a “racial epithet,” Lawson claimed that when he was eight years old, he was inspired to study non-violence.
His mother, who was a passivist, asked him “what nice” had become of his answer. He vowed to end a debate without using violence afterwards.
His non-violent ideas were exposed when he initially refrained from being drafted into the US Army to fight in the Korean War.
Lawson served 13 months in prison for review escaping. After finishing his knowledge, he travelled to Nagpur, India, to function as a preacher and examine the weight techniques developed by Gandhi.
After three decades in India, he returned to the US, where he met King, a other Methodist minister, at Oberlin College in Ohio.
His support for non-violence came at a time when black people had a polarized view of how to combat administrative bigotry and discrimination.
Lawson was persuaded by King to relocate to Nashville and started Vanderbilt University’s non-violent opposition methods course.
Some of his students later took important roles in the civil rights movement, including Marion Barry, a future Washington DC mayor, and John Lewis, a future congressman.
After King was killed in 1968, Lawson later met and made friends with the murderer.
Martin Luther King did had visited him, King said. I knew this, ” he said of James Earl Ray, King’s criminal.
After Ray’s relationship in prison, Lawson came to the conclusion that he was not solely to blame for King’s suicide.
Additionally, he was the initiator of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee ( SNCC), which was instrumental in the 1960s ‘ racial equality protests.
In a statement from 2020, Lawson said that “many of us had no option to do what we tried to do, mainly because we were forced to do it when we were young.
And we obediently swore to God that we would carry out whatever God had ordered of us to do in order to set things on the national plan.
” This must end. Black lives matter. ”