Rev. James M. Lawson and the Meaning of Juneteenth

The Rev. James M. Lawson Papers now digitized and available to public, expanding reach of late civil rights leader's work – Library News Online

As we conclude our celebration of Juneteenth 2024, we remember especially Rev. James M. Lawson (September 22, 1928 to June 10, 2024) was perhaps the most important and influential teacher and strategist of Gandhian nonviolence after Mahatma Gandhi himself.

Rev. James M. Lawson

Dr. Clarence B. Jones and Ambassador Andrew J. Young deeply admired Rev. Lawson and understood from personal experience the profound impact Rev. Lawson had on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the entire civil rights movement. Yesterday, to frame their observation of Juneteenth, USA Today published a short essay by Dr. Jones and Ambassador Young in memory of Rev. Lawson. I encourage you to read their moving tribute to Rev. Lawson here: “We were Martin Luther King Jr.’s inner circle. Now, only two of us remain.”

The Black Freedom Movement in the United States was framed by Rev. Lawson’s insistence on the power of nonviolence and the application of Gandhi’s methods to the struggle to overcome Jim Crow segregation and exploitation — from the sit-ins of 1960 to the Freedom Rides of 1961 to the nonviolent campaigns of Birmingham, Selma and Memphis in which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. played a leading role. Rev. Lawson’s fierce commitment to nonviolence as a way of life, and his dedication to training young activists in the methods and practice of nonviolent direct action, profoundly impacted the civil rights movement, the labor movement, and the movement against the war in Vietnam. Rev. Lawson’s nonviolence workshop, which began in Nashville Tennessee in 1959 when he was a graduate student in theology at Vanderbilt University, trained many of the most important civil rights activists, from John Lewis to Diane Nash, from Bernard Lafayette to Rev. C. T. Vivian, who went on to transform the South and the nation.

Lawson continued to teach his nonviolence workshop over the subsequent decades from his base at the Holman Methodist Church in Los Angeles. I personally attended many sessions of his workshop over recent years, and I considered Rev. Lawson to be my nonviolence teacher and mentor, spiritually as well as strategically.I was profoundly impacted by Rev. Lawson’s teachings and guidance, and by his powerful relationship with Rabbi Leonard Beerman throughout so many years, as fellow activists for human rights and human dignity.

The contemporary world has too much violent rhetoric and violent means and weaponry. Either the nations and the peoples of the world will pick up nonviolent struggle, or the current way in which the world moves will conclude with the massive suicide of the human race and life as we know it on this planet Earth.

Human life as we know it is such a powerful mysterious stream of energy and powers, and I submit that nonviolence is the only way to make progress for the well-being of the human family. It is the only way we the people of the United States can proceed to make equality, liberty, justice, and the beloved community a reality at every crossroads, in every rural and urban area of this country and the world. There are never any guarantees, but it is important to act as if it were possible to radically transform the world.

James M. Lawson, Revolutionary Nonviolence: Organizing for Freedom (with Michael K. Honey and Kent Wong, University of California Press, 2022), pp. 22-23.

For more information about Rev. Lawson, see here.

The Meaning of Juneteenth

Perhaps the best way to consider Juneteenth is not as the moment Black people attained freedom but as a moment in the long-running struggle to realize freedom. When slavery is replaced by a succession of systems — Black codes, Jim Crow, mass incarceration — that, though diminished in their brutality, oppress on the same principles, a true, comprehensive freedom still eludes.

Charles M. Blow, “On Juneteenth, Freedom Came With Strings Attached,” New York Times, June 19, 2024

See Robin McDowell and Margie Mason, “Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands,” AP, January 29, 2024

See “Black Freedom and Absolute Equality,” Fierce Urgency blog, June 19, 2021