[Xmca-l] James Lawson and perezhivanie

[Andy Blunden]

James Lawson is the Methodist preacher who trained the young 
members of the SNCC in non-violent action and wrote their 
constitution. I paste below and attach an excerpt from my 
book "The Origins of Collective Decision Making" which 
narrates Lawson's life up until April 1960. Perezhivanie was 
not the topic under discussion so it is not mentioned in the 
text, but xmca-ers should be able to see it, an example of 
perezhivanie:

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James Lawson was born in 1928, in Uniontown, Pennsylvania. 
His father, James Snr., was the grandson of an escaped 
slave, and a Minister for the African Methodist Episcopal 
Zion Church in New England.

Via the Free African Society(FAS) the Methodists had 
recruited freed slaves in Philadelphiain 1787, but as a 
result of a racist incident, some left to found the African 
Methodist Episcopal Church(AMEC). Nonetheless, many African 
Americans stayed with the United Methodist Church. The AMEC 
split started in Philadelphia and the AMEC Zion Church was a 
split that came out of New York. It was to AMEC Zion, James 
Lawson was born.

However, Lawson returned to The United Methodist Church, 
created by a 1939 merger of several branches of the 
Methodist Church, which set up five regional ‘jurisdictions’ 
of Methodists in the US, organized to maintain regionally 
identity and a sixth, called the ‘Central Jurisdiction’ 
which combined the Black annual conferences, thus building 
segregation into the constitution of the Church.The 
Methodists went through a long and painful process, carried 
out in accordance with the Methodist Code of Discipline, 
which mandates the principle of Majority, to re-integrate 
the white and Black, but it was not till after 1964 that 
Black conferences started to merge into white conferences. 
At the local level, congregations continued much as before. 
So it was within the Black section of the segregated United 
Methodist Church, that James Lawson became a Methodist.

James Snr. was a militant preacher; he packed a 38 pistol 
and set up branches of the NAACP wherever he was assigned to 
preach. After serving at St. James AMEZ Church in Massillon, 
Ohio, he transferred to the Lexington Annual Conference of 
the Central Jurisdiction of the United Methodist Church. 
James Snr. was no pacifist and according to Lawson he 
“refused to take any guff from anyone, particularly on the 
point of race” and “insisted that he was going to be treated 
as a man.”

Lawson’s mother, Philane May Cover, on the other hand, was 
decidedly nonviolent. Lawson’s challenge, which was to form 
his character, was to reconcile his father’s militancy with 
his mother’s nonviolence. Lawson grew up in Massillon. One 
day, at the age of 10, Lawson was asked by his mother to run 
an errand:

A little white child in an automobile yelled ‘nigger’ out 
the opened window. I walked over ... and, since I was in a 
hurry running my mother’s errand, I smacked the child and 
went on my way. When the Lawson kids got called ‘nigger’ on 
the streets or at school, we usually fought. I don’t know 
where we got that from, except that we figured that it was 
something to fight over. (Lawson, cited in King, 1999)

On the return trip home, aware of possible repercussions, 
Lawson tried to find the parents of the offending child, to 
talk to them, but the car was gone. Once home, he told his 
mother of the incident. Lawson’s mother replied, “Jimmy, 
what good did that do?”

She talked about who I was, the fact of God’s love, that we 
were a family of love and that such an incident could not 
hurt me, because of who I was. I don’t remember anyone else 
being around, but a stillness took over my being at that 
moment. It was, as I realized much later on, a mystical 
experience. In a very real way, my life stood still. I 
realized in that stillness that I had changed forever. One 
of the phrases my mother used in her conversation with me 
was that ‘there must be a better way’. I determined, from 
then on, that I would find the better way. (Lawson, cited in 
King, 1999, pp. 187-188)

He first became acquainted with Gandhi’s experiments in 
nonviolence as a child, thanks to the African-American press 
which the family discussed around the dinner table, and had 
read Gandhi’s autobiography as a teenager. At Baldwin 
Wallace College, a liberal arts Methodistcollege in Berea, 
Ohio, he studied Thoreau, Gandhi and Tolstoy, and the 
pacifist theologians Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Reinhold 
Niebuhr. At age 19, he became a draft resister, refusing 
service in the Korean War. Executive director of Fellowship 
Of Reconciliation (FOR), A. J. Muste,frequently visited to 
lecture at the College:

All of us in history classes were required to hear Muste. I 
was thrilled. He made me realize that I was not alone in my 
experimentation, that there was a world movement, and a 
national movement. ... He acquainted me with the Fellowship 
Of Reconciliation, which I joined on the spot in 1947. That 
meant that I got exposed to their book list.

After hearing a lecture by A. J. Muste, he joined FOR and 
CORE. Muste was instrumental thereafter in strengthening 
Lawson’s nonviolent orientation, directing him towards 
Gandhi and later facilitating his entry into the sit-in and 
boycott movement beginning in the South. In the late 1940s 
and early 1950s Lawson had organized sit-ins and protests 
directed at establishments that discriminated against blacks 
in Massillon, long before the Montgomery bus-boycott.

He was also active with the National Conference of Methodist 
Youth. Although a member of a segregated Methodist Church, 
he found plenty of support for his stands against racial 
discrimination and war from his white colleagues and church 
fellows. While he was in prison serving thirteen months of a 
two and a half year term for draft resistance in 1952, he 
was re-elected as Vice-President of the NCMY.

Wesleyan Methodism was central to Lawson’s outlook. Just as 
John Wesley had sought to cleanse individuals of iniquity, 
so could society be purged of the social sins of slavery, 
segregation, poverty, and war.Generations of African 
American Methodists from Harriet Tubman (AMEZ) and Henry M. 
Turner (AME) in the nineteenth century, to Rosa Parks (AME) 
and James Farmer (MEC), were led to social justice activism 
by this Methodist heritage.

Lawson used his prison time to read and think. Writing from 
prison in 1952 aged 23 years old and yet to enter the 
seminary, Lawson said he aspired to emulate “the life of 
Jesus, St. Francis, George Fox, Gandhi, Buddha... and other 
great religious persons.” These figures attached little 
importance to “theology but (to their) experience with 
God.”Further, he noted “religious failures today are in (the 
arena of) experience and practice, not theology.” When 
Lawson entered prison, he was a Christian pacifist.He told 
Mary King however, that his “first commitment was to work on 
race,” and conscientious objection came second.By the time 
of his release, he had advanced to Gandhian nonviolence. He 
wondered “why can’t a mass non-violent revolution be staged 
throughout the South where the segregation pattern is much 
like the ‘untouchables’ of India? Such a movement would have 
to start with one person who had the Christian vision to 
make such a revolution a reality in his own life.” Gandhian 
nonviolence became the synthesizing factor for Lawson’s 
religious thinking: the militancy of his father’s Methodism 
and the Christian pacifism that he drew from his mother.

Muste arranged for Lawson to visit India after his release 
from prison with a letter of introduction to activists in 
the Gandhian movement, and he remained in India from May 
1953 to 1956, working at Hislop College in Nagpur, reading 
Indian literature and working with Gandhi’s movement. 
Lawson’s practice would remain deeply religious; his 
nonviolence was saturated with the message of Christian 
love, and blended with principles synthesized from a broad 
range of religious and secular sources, both Eastern and 
Western. His aim was the “mass education and training of 
people in the use of nonviolent direct action techniques.” 
Lawson insisted that “you are fighting a system, not an 
individual, not a race, or not the people of another 
country, but a system.”

He continued his study of pacifism and Gandhian nonviolence 
at Oberlin College, Ohio. While still in India, he had read 
about Martin Luther King and his successful leadership of 
the Montgomery bus boycott.King’s lecture at Oberlin on 
February 6, 1957, fortified his long-held intention to work 
in the South for transformative social change. After King’s 
lecture to a packed audience, he and Lawson talked together 
at dinner.Though Lawson was contemplating study for a Ph.D., 
King told him “don’t wait, but come south now!” adding that 
there was no one else like Lawson.Muste arranged for FOR to 
hire Lawson as southern field secretary to be stationed at 
Nashville in January 1958. Upon his arrival, he found that 
Glenn Smiley, national field director of FOR, had arranged 
for Lawson to run a full schedule of workshops ‒ including 
one to take place early that year at the first annual 
meeting of the SCLC in Columbia, South Carolina.

At the SCLC meeting, King made an exuberant introduction of 
Lawson as FOR’s new regional representative and discussed 
the organization’s role in Montgomery, telling delegates to 
be sure to attend Lawson’s workshop on nonviolence. King 
took his seat in the first pew, waiting for the three-hour 
session to start:

Martin did that at every SCLC meeting as long as he lived. 
He would ask me to conduct an afternoon workshop, usually 
two or three hours, and he would arrange for it to be 
‘at-large’ so that everyone could attend, with nothing else 
to compete. He put it on the schedule himself. A few minutes 
early, he would show up and sit alone, as an example, in the 
front row.

Back in Nashville, Lawson continued with Monday evening 
workshops during the autumn of 1959 in which he trained the 
students who were to be the core of the Nashville sit-in 
movement. As a result of his involvement with the sit-ins 
Lawson was expelled from Vanderbilt, but he enrolled with 
Boston University to finish his degree in theology,while 
continuing to work with the students. Several professors in 
the School of Theology resigned over his expulsion.

The techniques that the students deployed were drawn from 
Lawson’s workshops. In 1958 and 1959, Lawson mobilized all 
that he knew about Christian pacifism, Gandhian nonviolence, 
and Methodist social ministry and blended them into an 
unprecedented curriculum that influenced the civil rights 
movement in Nashville and beyond.

Blending Christianity and interreligious sources, he did not 
present its philosophy and practice as a secular doctrine, 
but as the essence of religion itself. Core to nonviolence 
was mirroring God’s love for humankind and exhibiting it 
through concrete relationships of human solidarity and 
community. “Nonviolence,” Lawson taught, is the aggressive, 
forgiving, patient, long-suffering Christ-like and 
Christ-commanded love or good-will for all humankind even in 
the face of tension, fear, hatred, or demonic evil.” 
Moreover, “it is the readiness to absorb suffering with 
forgiveness and courage rather than to inflict suffering on 
others.”

Lawson divided his instruction into four modules: how 
nonviolence reacts, training for nonviolence, the virtues of 
nonviolence, and the methods of nonviolence. Practitioners 
prepared themselves by jettisoning anger, hostility and fear 
thus “minimizing the effect of an attack,” valuing love, 
courage, fearlessness, and forgiveness, and pursuing 
redemptive suffering which “releases unknown elements for 
good.” Preparation included meditation and prayer, study of 
the scriptures, practicing nonviolence through challenges to 
segregation in bus transportation and in other public 
facilities.The practice steps included fact-finding, 
negotiation, education of the community, and various methods 
of nonviolent direct action including sit-ins, boycotts, 
strikes, and civil disobedience. Lawson provided an 
extensive bibliography including relevant verses from the 
Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, and from the Chinese philosopher, 
Mo Ti and the Hebrew prophet, Isaiah.

The Nashville sit-ins and those led by students in other 
southern cities convinced Ella Baker of the SCLC to call a 
conference in April, 1960, at Shaw University in Raleigh, 
North Carolina. Out of this meeting emerged the Student 
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.Lawson delivered an 
opening keynote address that helped to frame SNCC’s 
nonviolent trajectory.Later, Lawson summarized discussions 
and consensus that emerged out of the conference, and his 
synopsis received the approval of everyone there. Lawson’s 
overall comments said that “nonviolence as it grows from 
Judaic-Christian tradition seeks a social order of justice 
permeated by love.”

It was Lawson who delivered the keynote address and framed 
SNCC’s nonviolent orientation.

The whole group, perhaps 120 participants, all in the room, 
asked me to draft a statement. Eventually, three different 
drafts emerged. The Nashville group was cohesive. The extant 
draft was the third, influenced by the Nashville group, 
after two earlier conversations. (Interview with King, June 
2014)

Lawson’s synopsis was approved by the Conference.

In a private email message Mary King told me:

He [James Lawson] was reading from the FOR booklist from a 
young age, but I don’t think that he was influenced on 
notions of Consensus by Quakers, because the connection was 
too abstract. Let me underscore that he says it was for him 
Methodist origins. (Private email, 15 April 2014)

In his interview with Mary King, Lawson confirmed that the 
origin of Consensus in SNCC was the Nashville Central 
Committee, confirming what Mary King had told me in April. 
As to the roots Consensus in Lawson’s own experience, he 
emphasized that:

It was the Methodist youth and student movements with which 
I had grown up, and this is how they made decisions. They 
knew the rules of parliamentary procedures, but they wanted 
to find a common mind. (Interview with King, June 2014)

The Methodist Church to this very day still mandates 
Majority decisions, but this would never have entailed 
children voting ‒ in general youngsters in these 
organizations were simply told what to do. The Black 
congregations had operated separately for more than a 
century, so there was some room for Lawson to develop a 
consensual model of collaboration in working with young 
people. It is also possible the Black congregations, like 
other Black Churches in America, drew on other traditions of 
decision making.

-- 
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Andy Blunden
http://home.mira.net/~andy
http://www.brill.com/products/book/origins-collective-decision-making 

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