Guest Lecture 2018

Rev. James Lawson

Following Jesus

Rev. James Lawson is an ordained United Methodist minister and one of the most significant leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. Because of his extensive work in teaching and employing nonviolent tactics, Martin Luther King, Jr. remarked that Lawson was “the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world.”

Between 1958 and 1960 Lawson led Nashville area workshops on nonviolent tactics. He helped organize the lunch counter sit-ins that took place between February 13 and May 10,1960 that contributed to the desegregation of the city. He also helped organize the SNCC in Raleigh, North Carolina, the 1961 Freedom Rides, the 1963 SCLC Birmingham Campaign, and thee James Meredith march in Mississippi. He was also the chair of the 1968 strategy committee for the Memphis Sanitation Worker’s strike.