UCLA historian Vinay Lal remembers speaking alongside the Rev. James Lawson during a panel discussion in Pasadena in 2008 and being awed by the “majestic” way the veteran civil rights leader spoke about the power of nonviolence and its ability to change the course of life. history.
“He had a booming voice and a lot of confidence, but what was surprising was that that confidence was always accompanied by compassion at the same time,” Lal said. “The way she talked about nonviolence came from deep experience.”
Lawson's commanding presence, moral clarity and big heart were on Lal's mind this week as he contemplated the storied life and contributions of his friend, who died in Los Angeles on Sunday after a brief illness. Lawson was 95 years old.
Lawson defended the philosophy of nonviolence adopted by Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi. He put those protest principles and techniques into practice as an architect of the black civil rights movement in the United States, most notably when he helped lead student sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Nashville and participated in the Freedom Rides on interstate buses across all the South. .
Lal, 63, met Lawson in the last years of his life.
A close bond developed between the men: one was a professor of history and Asian American studies from India, a nation that had freed itself from British colonial rule, and the other was a Christian minister from Uniontown, Pennsylvania, who had dedicated himself to end racial discrimination. oppression in the USA
Civil rights icon Reverend James Lawson speaking in Inglewood in February 2022.
(Genaro Molina/Los Angeles Times)
Lawson was pastor emeritus of Holman United Methodist Church in South Los Angeles and even until recently had hosted nonviolence workshops at the church every fourth Saturday of the month.
Lal blogs and posts segments about politics and culture in the United States and his home country of India on YouTube. She attended some of those sessions at church.
Starting in 2013, Lawson sat down with Lal for what turned out to be more than 26 hours of recorded interviews conducted over 13 sessions, with the intention of publishing the material one day. Privately, Lawson was introspective, fiercely committed to racial justice and worker dignity and often funny, Lal said.
In those conversations, some of which lasted up to three hours, the Los Angeles pastor detailed how Gandhi, who rose to prominence as a leader of India's nonviolent independence movement, inspired him.
“Lawson was very clear that Gandhi was singularly the most important man in world history for having added the idea of nonviolence to the vocabulary of everyday life,” Lal said.
Vinay Lal, a professor of history and Asian American studies at UCLA, met the Rev. James Lawson in the final years of the civil rights icon's life.
(Michael Blackshire/Los Angeles Times)
Lawson had been a practitioner of nonviolence since reading Gandhi's autobiography as a college freshman in 1947. He would never meet his hero. Gandhi was assassinated in New Delhi in 1948.
But when Lawson was a young Methodist minister in 1953, he was thrilled when the church sent him to the central Indian city of Nagpur, where he worked in the ministry, coached football, basketball and track, and studied the strategies of Gandhi for peaceful resistance, Lal said. .
Lawson was still living in India when Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat in the whites-only front section of a racially segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Lawson devoured newspaper articles in the Indian press about the young minister from Atlanta. King, who led a successful bus boycott to desegregate the Montgomery bus system.
Lawson had also long been aware of black Americans' enduring affinity for Gandhi, he told Lal.
WEB Du Bois wrote the first of 18 essays on Gandhi in 1921, Lal said. A decade later, Howard Thurman and his wife Sue Bailey Thurman were among the first black leaders to visit India to meet with Gandhi. He peppered them with questions about voting rights, lynchings and racial segregation and explained that “it may be through the Negroes that the pure message of nonviolence will be delivered to the world,” according to an account published by the Gandhi Memorial Center in Maryland. Bayard Rustin spent six months studying nonviolence in the country.
Indian spiritual leader Mahatma Gandhi in 1944. The Rev. James Lawson believed Gandhi was “the most important man in the history of the world for having added the idea of nonviolence to the vocabulary of everyday life,” Lawson's friend said. UCLA professor Vinay Lal.
(Associated Press)
At his home in the San Fernando Valley, Lal works in a separate studio, a room so packed with bookshelves and stacks of books on civil rights in both India and his adopted country, the United States, that he walks slowly to reach your messy desktop computer.
In Lal's digital archives are hundreds of black press clippings about India's independence movement, as well as glowing assessments of the loincloth-clad activist and essays urging black Americans to find their own “Black Gandhi.”
A 1922 article in the California Eagle newspaper of Los Angeles calls for the establishment of “Gandhi Day.”
A tribute to Gandhi written by pioneering black educator, activist, and presidential advisor Mary McLeod Bethune after his death praises him for showing humans “the way to rise above considerations of nation, race, creed, or color.”
Whenever Lal met Lawson in Los Angeles, he too never failed to speak of Gandhi in a reverent tone, although by then his admiration was well established.
“He put Gandhi, in many ways, on a pedestal,” Lal said.
After returning to the United States in 1956, Lawson settled in Nashville after King encouraged him to move south to help the movement. There, he conducted nonviolent protest training in a church basement, stoking a passion for racial justice in the student activists he mentored, including his protégé, future Georgia congressman John Lewis. Lawson spoke at Lewis' funeral in 2020.
The Rev. James Lawson speaks in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, in September 2015. Lawson, who led workshops on nonviolence during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, said he was encouraged by efforts to maintain equality in the ballot boxes amid attempts to thwart it.
(Mark Humphrey/Associated Press)
Lawson became one of King's most trusted allies. He saw in King the fulfillment of the hope that had sounded in the black newspaper headlines of yesteryear.
“When he saw what was happening in Montgomery, he understood that finally, finally, that call for an American Gandhi was finally being answered,” Lal said.
Describing his own trip to India in 1959, King, a devout student of Gandhian principles, wrote in Ebony magazine: “To other countries I may go as a tourist, but to India I come as a pilgrim.”
During their meetings in Los Angeles, Lawson and Lal often discussed Gandhi's conception of ahimsa, the Sanskrit word for nonviolence. Their conversations were deep. It was clear that Lawson didn't just want to practice nonviolence. He had tried to embody the concept, to incorporate it into his own identity.
Gandhi coined the term 'satyagraha' — truth force, or soul force, a way of being in the world,” Lal said. “According to Reverend Lawson, Gandhi had created a new science. “It was a comprehensive vision of the world, a way of understanding how to lead a non-violent life.”
Lal was also able to tell how much those three years in India meant to Lawson and how the experience prepared him for the challenge of confronting racial segregation in the Deep South.
“Sometimes you see things more clearly from abroad than from your own country,” Lal said. “He came back energized by thinking about how he could play a role.”
Lal says Lawson's vision of activism as an activity that requires not only sound principles but also strict self-discipline, responsibility and a generous spirit is equally relevant today in a new era of youth protests against injustices at home and abroad.
Lawson believed that “if you feel that you are morally obligated to resist, then you must also accept the consequences,” Lal said. But he also believed that “conviction and compassion go hand in hand.”
Lawson understood all too well the risks involved in committing to justice, peace, and love.
As a conscientious objector during the Korean War in 1951, Lawson served 14 months in prison for refusing to report for the draft and used his imprisonment as an opportunity to study nonviolent protest. He was controversially expelled by Vanderbilt University Divinity School for leading the Nashville sit-ins and imprisoned in several states as an activist.
It was Lawson who invited King to Memphis in the spring of 1968 to support striking black sanitation workers, when Lawson was pastor of Memphis Centennial United Methodist Church. King was assassinated on April 4, the day after delivering his “I've Been to the Mountaintop” speech, in which he praised Lawson.
On Monday, as news spread about Lawson's death, Lal was happy to see that Lawson was once again being celebrated as a towering figure.
Lal received an email that night from Gandhi's grandson, Gopalkrishna Gandhi, whom Lal had invited to a conference for nonviolent resistance scholars at UCLA in 2020. Lawson gave a moving keynote speech at the meeting about “the long, bitter but beautiful fight for justice.” in the United States,” Lal recalls.
“I am very grateful that thanks to you I was able to meet a great man,” the young Gandhi's email read.
Lal responded with his own superlatives about Lawson, borrowing another word Gandhi's grandfather had often used, an Old English term for defender or follower:
“He was a colossus, a true devotee of ahimsa,” Lal wrote, “and a very compassionate man.”
