James Lawson spent three years as a missionary in India in the 1950s, where he also studied Gandhi's ideas about nonviolence. He returned to the States to do graduate work at Oberlin. There he met Martin Luther King Jr., who urged him to give up his studies and come South to put his ideas into action. Lawson moved to Nashville in 1958, and soon began holding a weekly workshop on nonviolence. Out of this came the Nashville Student Movement and, to a large extent, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

Teaching nonviolence in the ’50s was a major challenge because it was like teaching a foreign language — even though it was a language deeply rooted in the spirituality of Jesus, deeply rooted in the spirituality of many of the prophetic stories of the Hebrew bible.

So we had to try to show people that here was a magnificent history that was a secret that we were trying to unpack. That King was not a man from Mars but a man out of the black church and out of the black scriptures. And that nonviolence itself was a similar force untapped and unexplored. . . .

Also, we tried to insist that faith requires the confidence that you can walk through the valley of the shadow of death and fear no evil. You can come out unscathed because your own spirituality, your own soul remains one of integrity and truth no matter what goes on in your own environment.

— From an interview in This Far by Faith, a documentary on the African-American religious experience, which aired on PBS in 2003. The clip that contains these comments can be seen here (scroll down to the James Lawson video link toward the bottom of the page).

Mug shot courtesy of the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

Portrait © 2006 by Eric Etheridge