{"id":1387,"date":"2012-04-02T14:41:35","date_gmt":"2012-04-02T18:41:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sth-history\/?page_id=1387"},"modified":"2025-07-04T14:48:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-04T18:48:11","slug":"james-lawson-1960","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sth-history\/james-lawson-1960\/","title":{"rendered":"James Lawson (1960)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\ufeff<\/span>\ufeff<\/span>
\nWatch this video on YouTube<\/a><\/object><\/p>\n

In the spring of 1960, all hell broke loose in Nashville, Tennessee. James Lawson, a young pastor and civil rights leader, was expelled from Vanderbilt University Divinity School for organizing lunch counter sit-ins and other nonviolent protests against racial injustice. Furious demonstrations erupted in response to the university\u2019s action. Faculty resigned, and national media swarmed the city.\u00a0 Eventually Vanderbilt invited Lawson back. Instead, he headed for Boston.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were many offers to continue my education,\u201d recalls Lawson (STH\u201960). \u201cBoston University was the one that said, without reservation, just come and we\u2019ll accept all your credits, we\u2019ll grant your degree. That was critically important.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some eight years later, Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS\u201955, Hon.\u201959) would call Lawson \u201cthe leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

The son and grandson of Methodist ministers, Lawson grew up in Ohio and earned a preacher\u2019s license in 1947, the year he graduated from high school. Influenced by Gandhi, he worked for several years as a minister and teacher at Hislop College in Nagpur, India. After earning his BU degree, Lawson helped coordinate the 1961 Freedom Rides and the Meredith March in 1966. While pastor at the Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis, he played a major role in the 1968 sanitation workers\u2019 strike. In support of their efforts, King came to Memphis and delivered his famous \u201cMountaintop\u201d speech, on the eve of his assassination.<\/p>\n

Lawson\u2019s activism was wide-ranging. He protested the Cold War, spent more than a year in prison for refusing the Korean War draft, and was jailed multiple times in several states, once for praying on White House grounds.<\/p>\n

Today, he is pastor emeritus at the Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles, a congregation he led for more than twenty-five years, and he continues to live out his beliefs by training activists, opposing the Iraq War, and fighting for immigrants\u2019 and workers\u2019 rights. Vanderbilt has made amends, naming Lawson a Distinguished Alumnus in 2005 and inviting him back to Nashville in 2006 as a Distinguished University Professor.<\/p>\n

Although he spent only one summer at BU\u2019s School of Theology before completing his degree, Lawson says he felt at home among so many familiar voices for social justice, such as Walter Muelder (STH\u201930, GRS\u201933, Hon.\u201973), Edgar Brightman (STH\u201910, GRS\u201912), and Howard Thurman (Hon.\u201967).<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reason I hadn\u2019t gone to Boston in the first place,\u201d Lawson says, \u201cwas that I had read so much and knew so many people from there that I wanted to go someplace where there would be a different influence in my intellectual effort.\u201d<\/p>\n

And although the summer of 1960 may have been a blink of the historical eye in terms of Lawson\u2019s study and work, it apparently let in just the right amount of light.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy wife, Dorothy, and I had a number of very wonderful experiences in Boston those three months. We\u2019d come from such a hectic firestorm. I continue to remember Boston University as a consciousness-raising and strength-renewing place.\u201d<\/p>\n

This article originally appeared in Calib Daniloff’s, “A Short Stay, Long in Memory<\/a>,” Bostonia: Boston University Alumni, 2008.<\/h5>\n

 <\/p>\n

Work:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lawson, James M. “Foreword,” in Unfinished Revolution<\/em> by Tom Kahn (New York: Socialist Party-Social Democratic Federation, 1960). http:\/\/babel.hathitrust.org\/cgi\/pt?id=mdp.39015074198089;page=root;view=image;size=100;seq=12;num=6
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\ufeff\ufeff Watch this video on YouTube In the spring of 1960, all hell broke loose in Nashville, Tennessee. James Lawson, a young pastor and civil rights leader, was expelled from Vanderbilt University Divinity School for organizing lunch counter sit-ins and other nonviolent protests against racial injustice. Furious demonstrations erupted in response to the university\u2019s action. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3242,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":152,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sth-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1387"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sth-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sth-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sth-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3242"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sth-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1387"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sth-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1387\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3085,"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sth-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/1387\/revisions\/3085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sth-history\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}