Muncie Times, Muncie, Delaware County, 3 September 1998 — Page 17

The Muncie Times, September 3,1998, Page 17

CIVIL RIGHTS JOURNAL James Lawson: an unsung civil rights movement hero

I’m not sure if it was the way the Fourth of July hit me this year, as I re-read Frederick Douglass’ speech asking what Independence Day meant to people who were not free. Or maybe it was just the fact that I have seen several stories about those heroes and sheroes of the civil rights movement and what is happening to them now. Or maybe it’s because I’ve been reading several new books about the civil rights movement and so the names are fresh on my mind. But whatever the reason, I find that I want to salute them now-giving them their roses while they can still smell them. So I’m going to take two columns to remember some of our patriots, our warriors for justice. James Lawson One of those who was so instrumental in the civil rights movement, but whose name is mostly unknown is James Lawson. An Ohioan by birth, Lawson was an Oberlin College theology student when he met Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It was a meeting which probably changed both of their lives. Lawson had decided as a child that there was a better way than violence. He remembers his mother’s questioning him upon his report of having slapped a small white child who had called him a “nigger.” She asked him simply, what good did that do? He said that everything in his life seemed to change at that moment and his mother talked to him about how much he was loved by God and his family and how unimportant name calling was in the whole scheme of his life. Lawton made a vow to himself never, if possible.

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to hit anyone again. In the late 1940s, as a college student at BaldwinWallace College outside Cleveland, Lawson’s world expanded and he became aware of another world composed of people of color. He had already become an activist, having staged several sit-ins as a teenager and while in college he joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an ecumenical peace organization. His commitment to peace deepened and in his senior year of college, with the Korean War raging, he refused to seek a ministerial deferral or conscientious objector status. He went to prison for refusing to be drafted. He used his prison term to re-read Ghandi’s writings on non-violence. A year later, Lawson returned to Baldwin Wallace to finish his degree and was sent by the Methodist Church to India to work in a Presbyterian college. His time in India deepened his commitment to non-violence and the teachings of Ghandi and gave him a broader sense of the world. When he read about Dr. King and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, Lawson knew it was time for him to return. Shortly after his arrival, James Lawson met Dr. King and began a 10-year career of teaching non-violence to students and others in the civil rights movement. In the early years Dr. King himself studied under

Lawson. A brilliant but quiet man, Lawson taught the students the basic principles of non-violence: that they had the power of moral right

on their sideband that power could bring down the walls of segregation; that they must understand, at the very core of their being, that they were created by God and that there was no shame in being black in white America; that love would always conquer hate. Lawson then taught his students what to expect on the picket lines and how to protect each other and themselves from the violence which would surely come. He prepared them to hear

epithets and threats. He tried to immunize them against the anger and violence and to center them on God’s love. Lawson himself led dozens, perhaps hundreds of sitins and marches during his days with the movement. He endured many beatings and yet his own commitment to non-violence never waned. Bemiece Powell Jackson is executive director of the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice in Cleveland, Ohio.

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