As a child, the Rev. James Lawson Jr. chose nonviolence. And he would spend the rest of his life applying it as a strategy — using it not as retreat, but as a disciplined way of fighting back, dismantling discrimination and confronting what he called the deeper, systemic violence embedded in American life.
That dual legacy — moral conviction and tactical rigor — framed a book launch Friday, Feb. 20, at the National Civil Rights Museum, where Lawson’s newly released memoir, “Nonviolent: A Memoir of Resistance, Agitation, and Love,” was celebrated in a room filled with movement veterans, sanitation worker families and a new generation still wrestling with the same questions Lawson confronted decades ago.
Moderated by journalist and activist Carol Jenkins, the program featured Lawson’s eldest son, John C. Lawson II, and journalist Emily Yellin, who spent years working with Lawson to bring his voice to the page.
But the story at the heart of the evening began long before Nashville, Birmingham or Memphis.
It began with a boy growing up in Ohio.
“There’s got to be a better way.”
Lawson was 8 years old when he slapped a white child who had called him a racial slur. He went home and confessed to his mother — “Big Mama,” as the family called her — expecting sympathy.
Instead, she asked a simple question: What good did that do?
Then she told him: “There’s got to be a better way.”
For Lawson, his son said, that moment became spiritual and strategic at the same time. It was the last time he chose violence. And it marked the beginning of a lifelong search for that “better way.”
On Friday night, that childhood decision was presented not as naïveté, but as the foundation of one of the most sophisticated organizing philosophies of the Civil Rights Movement.
Nonviolence as discipline
“People think of nonviolence as passive,” Yellin told the audience. “But it wasn’t. You do get angry. You do fight back. You just don’t imitate your oppressor.”
That distinction — fight back without becoming what you resist — became Lawson’s life work.
After refusing to register for the draft during the Korean War, Lawson served 13 months in federal prison. From prison, and later in India studying Gandhian philosophy, he sharpened his understanding of nonviolence not as sentiment, but as structure.
By the time he arrived in Nashville in the late 1950s, Lawson was training students in what amounted to tactical rehearsals: how to sit at a lunch counter without reacting, how to absorb insults, how to remain disciplined under attack.
In the book, he lays out written guidelines for demonstrators: Do not strike back; do not curse; remain courteous; remember your purpose. The list reads less like piety and more like military preparation.
“He saw it as training,” Yellin said. “As much preparation as being in the military.”
From those workshops emerged names that would shape history — including John Lewis and Diane Nash — and a model for direct action that spread across the South.
Not spontaneous. Not accidental.
Yellin also pushed back against one of the most persistent myths of the Civil Rights Movement — that its defining moments were spontaneous.
“Everybody acts like Rosa Parks was just tired,” she said dismissively. “Uh, No.”
The Montgomery Bus Boycott was planned, strategized and tested. The decision about when to act, who would act and how the community would respond was deliberate, Yellin said.
The same was true in Nashville, she said. The sit-ins that would help crack segregation across the South did not erupt because someone wanted a cup of coffee. Lawson and local organizers spent months meeting, listening, identifying targets and training students before a single lunch counter was occupied.
“They prepared for a year,” Yellin said. “They talked to people. They figured out where the problem was. They tested it.”
Nonviolence, in other words, was not improvisation. It was infrastructure. That extended even to leadership.
Lawson and Martin Luther King Jr., Yellin explained, were intentional about roles. King would often become the public face — the one who could command national attention. Lawson, by agreement, would frequently remain behind the scenes: recruiting, strategizing, building structures that could survive arrests and backlash.
“He was the strategist,” Yellin said. “Somebody had to stay out of jail and plan.”
The movement was not built around a single charismatic figure, she added, but around cultivated leaders. In Nashville, Lawson helped shape and mentor young activists such as Lewis and Nash, placing them at the forefront while ensuring the architecture of resistance remained steady behind them.
There would be marches. There would be arrests. There would be cameras. But there also would be meetings, rehearsals, contingency plans and a carefully distributed leadership structure designed to outlast any one personality. That, too, was nonviolence.
Memphis: Poverty as violence
If desegregation was phase one, economic justice was phase two.
When Lawson came to Memphis in 1962, he encountered poverty he described as “deep … prevalent and vicious in a way I had not seen before in the United States.”
On Friday, Jenkins drew a straight line from that observation to today’s child poverty statistics, arguing that Lawson and Martin Luther King Jr. were moving beyond civil rights toward human rights — toward confronting what Lawson called structural violence.
“Reverend Lawson considered poverty violence,” Yellin said. “In the richest country in the world, people (are) living in poverty — that’s not accidental.”
John Lawson echoed that framework, recalling conversations between his father and King about tearing down “whites only” signs first — then turning toward what his father sometimes described as “plantation capitalism.”
The sanitation strike of 1968, born with the now-iconic “I AM A MAN” declaration, was not only about dignity on the job. It was about wages, families and survival.
The audience at the book launch reflected that history. Family members of sanitation workers sat alongside museum leaders, longtime activists and young performers from Memphis Jazz Workshop. The evening’s music — “This Little Light of Mine,” “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” and a rousing, updated “Which Side Are You On?” — functioned less as nostalgia than as reminder.
Family ties
Yellin’s connection to Lawson was not academic. She first met him when she was 5 years old, growing up in Memphis, where her parents were active in documenting the sanitation strike and interviewing movement leaders.
She and John Lawson attended elementary school together. Decades later, after building a journalism career that included work for The New York Times, she reconnected with James Lawson while producing a 2018 project on the sanitation strike.
When the pandemic hit in 2020, she asked him if he had ever thought about writing his memoir?
“He said my family’s been wanting me to do this forever,” Yellin recalled. “And I said, well, I would love to help you.”
John Lawson told the audience the final decision rested with his mother, Dorothy Lawson, his father’s partner of 64 years. “When Mom said yes,” he said, “the vote was done.”
A continuum, not a chapter
James Lawson, who died in 2024 at age 95, never saw nonviolence as a relic of the 1960s.
His son recounted that even from a hospital bed, Lawson was watching news coverage of campus protests and talking about organizing students into disciplined, nonviolent movements.
“The struggle for justice and equality in this country is not an end point,” John Lawson said. “It’s a continuum.”
