Journeys in the Deep South I – A Birthday Tribute, September 22, to Reverend James M. Lawson
The Fact of Being Black: History, Culture, Politics IV
Here I am at long last, at the site of what can likely be described as the first workshop of nonviolence in Jim Crow South. The attempt to desegregate lunch counters was, of course, far from being the first step in the long road to gain equal rights for black people in the US during the course of what is now characterized as the Civil Rights Movement. It had been preceded by the Montgomery Bus Boycott—and, in turn, concerted struggles to integrate transportation services in a large number of cities in the southern states. The Nashville Sit-ins, long in the planning, were not even the first such act of nonviolent resistance. When over a hundred students from Nashville’s historically black colleges and universities such as Fisk sat down in segregated lunch counters on 10 February 1960 in open defiance of the law, they had already been preceded by four black students who had initiated the same action at a lunch counter at Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina.
A plaque that commemorates the site of the Nashville Sit-ins, on Fifth Avenue. Photo: Vinay Lal, September 2017.
Nevertheless, what transpired in Nashville marks an extraordinary moment in the history of nonviolent resistance in the United States: to reiterate, it is here that we can justly speak of the first workshop of nonviolence in the deeply segregated South. The architect of this movement was the Reverend James M. Lawson, on whom I expect to lavish many entries in the weeks and months ahead. Reverend Lawson, who is 89 years old today, had spent a long stint in India during the 1950s—three years, from 1953 to 1956, as a Methodist minister in Nagpur, to be precise. Though the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement were all steeped in the writings of Gandhi, Lawson was the only principal figure to have lived in India—an assignment that the young clergyman accepted readily since, as he thought, it would give him an opportunity to study at first hand the life of Gandhi and understand how he had forged a movement of mass nonviolent resistance in India.
When the Montgomery bus boycott was first organized, Lawson was still in India; he returned to the US a year later and shortly thereafter, as he has put it me on more than one occasion, “shook hands with Martin”. Lawson brought to the movement a detailed knowledge of the strategies of nonviolent resistance deployed by Gandhi that no one else, possibly barring Bayard Rustin, could claim. In the Deep South, the iron law of segregation prevailed in every domain of life and in every visage of social relations between the races. The landmark Supreme Court ruling in the case of Brown vs. the Board of Education (1954) had signaled the intent of civil rights activists to break the barriers of segregation, but the legislatures of the southern states had effectively adopted the stance attributed to President Andrew Jackson in the celebrated case of Worcester v. Georgia (1832) where the Court had ruled that the Federal Government had sole jurisdiction in dealing with Indian (ie, Native American) nations: “[Chief Justice] John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” If progress in desegregating schools was thus stalled, in other domains of public life the Brown decision had barely scratched the surface.
In 1958, then, Lawson set upon a course of action that would alter the face of the Civil Rights Movement. He was determined to integrate lunch counters: not only was the segregation pervasive here, but Lawson would have understood that who one eats with and who one shares one’s bread with are among the most significant markers of social existence. The lunch counter at a Woolworth’s store was the most visible face of segregation in a public space. Lawson had arrived in Nashville in 1958, enrolling as a student in the Master’s program at the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University. But he was already one of the leaders of CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, and committed to nonviolent activism. Nashville was also home to several universities—not just Vanderbilt, but historically black colleges and universities such as Fisk, Tennessee State University, and the American Baptist College (Seminary).
Fisk University, Nashville, Tennessee: this “Gothically imposing structure” is less than 300 meters from Clark Memorial Church, and it is from Fisk, among other universities, that black students were drawn to the Reverend Lawson and the Civil Rights Movement. Photo: Vinay Lal, September 2017.
In September 1958, Lawson gathered students around him and commenced what would become a year-long workshop in nonviolent civil action and resistance. The red-brick Clark Memorial Methodist Church, at 14th Avenue North, less than 300 meters from Fisk University, would become the nursery where an entire generation of activists—Diane Nash, James Bevel, John Lewis, Bernard Lafayette, Marion Barry, to mention only some of those who would become prominent in the civil rights movement and in American public life—were trained by Lawson to live out the principles of nonviolent resistance.
Clark Memorial Methodist Church, 1014 Fourteenth Avenue North, Nashville. It is in mainly in the basement of this church that the Rev. Lawson conducted his famous workshops in nonviolent resistance. “Clark Memorial”, wrote John Lewis in his memoir of 1998, “is still there today, a modest redbrick chapel two blocks away from the Gothically imposing structures of Fisk. There are no plaques, no monuments, nothing to suggest that anything historic happened there. It’s just a little church on a sleepy street . . . But from the autumn of 1958 into the following fall, that little building played a major role in educating, preparing and shaping a group of young men and women who would lead the way for years to come in the nonviolent struggle for civil rights in America.” (Walking with the Wind, p. 76). Photo: Vinay Lal.
He assigned students, or might one say his protégés, readings from Gandhi, Thoreau, Lao-Tzu, and Reinhold Niebuhr, the American theologian who would author the influential Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932), a work that is also said to have been important to the thinking of Barack Obama. John Lewis, the long-time Congressman from Georgia who is Lawson’s most celebrated protégé, has furnished a reasonably long description in Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (1998) of Lawson’s workshop; as he put it, “We discussed and debated every aspect of Gandhi’s principles, from his concept of ahimsa … to satyagraha—literally, ‘steadfastness in truth,’ a grounding foundation of nonviolent civil disobedience, of active pacifism” (p. 76).
Lawson taught his students how to take the blows of injustice upon their own shoulders and, with forbearance, humility, and patience, transform the perpetrators of violence; more precisely, he had them enact, time and again, the roles of both violent segregationists and nonviolent civil resisters at lunch counters. A group of black people would be seated at lunch counters intended for white people; another group of white men would sneer and spit at them, empty bottles of ketchup and mustard on their heads, throw punches at them, and kick them while they writhed in pain on the ground. Lawson trained his students not only to forgo any retaliation, but to endure whatever insults the segregationists threw their way. “Back in that fall of ‘58”, Lewis would reminiscence in his memoir, “we were just kids, totally mesmerized by the torrent of energy and ideas and inspiration washing over us every Tuesday night in those Jim Lawson workshops” (p. 80).
The reverse side of the plaque. Photo: Vinay Lal.
Malcolm X, perhaps the most significant (and in his own way mesmerizing) detractor of nonviolent resistance in his days, had quite a few cynical things to say about the sit-ins. We’ve done plenty of sitting around, he told a captive audience in his famous “The Bullet or the Ballot” speech. Malcolm could be compelling, even enthralling, but it is his very seductiveness of which we should be wary. Meanwhile, nearly sixty years later, the Reverend James Lawson is still carrying out workshops in nonviolent resistance in Los Angeles, which he adopted as home over forty years ago. His very life, one might say, is an object lesson on the meaning of fortitude and patience as part of the grammar of a life steeped in the ethos of nonviolence.
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