23/08/2024
Activists and political leaders of a wide variety of minority communities have paid tribute to the work of long time ally of human rights in the United States, Mr James Morris Lawson Junior, who has passed on at the age of ninety five. Wikipedia reports that Mr Lawson was an American activist and university professor. He was a leading theoretician and tactician of nonviolence within the Civil Rights Movement. During the 1960s, he served as a mentor to the Nashville Student Movement and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He later served as a pastor in Los Angeles for 25 years. The SNCC Civil Rights heritage page notes that while in prison as a conscientious objector to the Korean War, James Lawson wrote, “I’m an extreme radical which means the potent possibility of future jails. My life will be rather exciting, and (will) offer security only in the sense of service to God’s Kingdom.” After his release from prison in 1953, Lawson traveled to India as a Methodist church missionary and studied satyagraha–loosely meaning “insistence on truth”–the philosophical heart of Mohandas Gandhi’s nonviolent resistance to British colonialism. Lawson's students when he taught at University in Tennessee played a leading role in the Open Theater Movement, the Freedom Rides, the March on Washington, Freedom Summer, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the Children's Crusade in Birmingham, the 1965 Selma Voting Rights Movement, the Chicago Freedom Movement, and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement during the tumultuous late sixties. Lawson became pastor of Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis, Tennessee in 1962. In 1968, when black sanitation workers began the Memphis sanitation strike for higher wages and union recognition after two of their co-workers were accidentally crushed to death, Reverend Lawson served as chairman of their strike committee. Mr Lawson moved to Los Angeles in 1974, where he was pastor of Holman United Methodist Church. He retired in 1999, but continued his civil rights work. While in Los Angeles, he was active in the labor movement, the American Civil Liberties Union, and movements for reproductive choice and gay rights. He served as chairman of the Laity United for Economic Justice. During this time, Lawson hosted Lawson Live, a weekly call-in radio show, where he discussed human- and social-rights issues. In 2004, he received the Community of Christ International Peace Award. and on December 10, 2021, UCLA announced the renaming of the UCLA Labor Center building next to MacArthur Park as the UCLA James M. Lawson, Jr. Labor Center, in honuor of his longstanding commitment to the advancement of worker rights and the wellbeing of laborers.
