Alumni News

Reverend James M. Lawson (STH’60)

By sthalum June 23rd, 2024 in Alumni/ae Deaths

This obituary was originally posted by Bostonia and can be found here.

Methodist pastor James Lawson embodied Christianity’s turn-the-other-cheek ethic. Influenced by Mahatma Gandhi’s civil disobedience, as well as by his pacifist mother, Lawson (STH’60) was expelled from Vanderbilt’s divinity school for organizing peaceful sit-ins at segregated Southern lunch counters, went to jail multiple times for nonviolent civil rights protests, and as strategist of the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike, summoned movement leaders to the city.

Headlining those responders was Martin Luther King, Jr. (GRS’55, Hon.’59), who was assassinated during that visit.

Lawson, whom King called “the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world,” died June 9 at age 95 from cardiac arrest in Los Angeles, where he lived.

Lawson came to the philosophy of nonviolence at age 10 after slapping a white boy who had voiced a racist slur. Lawson’s mother, a pacifist and an antiracist, scolded him, prompting her son to swear off violence.

As an adult, he helped coordinate the 1961 Freedom Rides, where activists boarded segregated interstate buses in the South (Lawson rode the first bus), and the 1966 Meredith March. That march began as a one-man protest walk through the Mississippi Delta by James Meredith, who’d been the first Black student to attend the University of Mississippi four years earlier. When a white man shot and injured Meredith, Lawson and others got civil rights organizations to continue his march, registering more than 4,000 African American voters along the way.

Throughout the tumultuous decades-long crusade for rights, Lawson mingled the idealism of nonviolence with hard-headed practicality about its costs and benefits. His New York Times obituary notes that he disagreed with fellow activists who argued that state-sanctioned brutality against Black Americans demanded self-defense.

“It is only when the hostility comes to the surface that the people see the character of our nation,” he said. “Chances are that without people being hurt, we cannot solve the problem.”

Leading seminars on nonviolence for protesters, Lawson didn’t sugarcoat what they were in for, and he tutored them on survival techniques. “Volunteers were told what to expect—beatings in the street, strippings and floggings in jail, broken jaws,” the Times reports. “They engaged in vivid role-playing to learn how to respond. For a sit-in at a lunch counter, they were told, sit up straight, be courteous, and don’t strike back. And afterward: Know the roads out of town, the location of sanctuaries and the telephone numbers to call, if calls were possible.”

“An entire generation of younger leaders first learned, from him, the power of nonviolent resistance as the most moral, practical, and effective tool for social transformation,” says the Rev. Walter Fluker (GRS’88, STH’88, Hon.’24), Martin Luther King, Jr., Professor Emeritus of Ethical Leadership at BU’s School of Theology. “In fact, this nation and the world are indebted to this largely unsung hero.”

Fluker met Lawson while teaching at Vanderbilt (which apologized years after expelling Lawson and hosted him as a visiting professor). “This incredible human being,” Fluker says, made him “a recipient of his gentle wisdom many times… Goodnight, Jim. May angels of mercy sing thee to thy rest.’

After King’s assassination, Lawson was among those who rejected the official investigation’s finding that gunman James Earl Ray had acted alone. Ray confessed to the murder, then recanted his confession, but pleaded guilty to avoid a trial that could have resulted in his execution. In 1978, Lawson officiated Ray’s marriage in prison; he would attend Ray’s memorial service following his death in 1998.

Lawson was born in 1928 in Pennsylvania, one of 10 children. His great-grandfather had escaped enslavement in Maryland; his father was an African Methodist Episopal minister and one of the first Black graduates of Canada’s McGill University. He moved the family to Ohio, where Lawson earned a bachelor’s degree from Baldwin-Wallace University.

He demonstrated his pacifism in 1951, when he was convicted of draft resistance during the Korean War and spent 13 months behind bars. For several years in the early 1950s, he taught and ministered in India, studying Gandhi’s philosophy. Returning to the United States, he met King, who recruited him to his own nonviolent activism for African American rights. Lawson became a cofounder in 1960 of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a group of mostly Black college students who participated in some of the era’s major peaceful protests for equal rights.

That was the year Vanderbilt expelled him, at which point, he told Bostonia in 2008, “There were many offers to continue my education. Boston University was the one that said, without reservation, just come and we’ll accept all your credits, we’ll grant your degree.” That was critically important, he said, in his decision to enroll at STH and complete his degree in sacred theology.

With that degree in hand, he pastored churches in Tennessee, and from 1974 to 1999, the 2,700-congregant Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles. He embraced other causes, from criticizing US poverty and military interventions abroad to supporting gay and immigrant rights.

Lecturing at Vanderbilt in 2006 to students several generations removed from Jim Crow, he piqued their attention, the Timesreports, by asking, “How many of you have experienced a hate crime against yourself? Let’s see the hands.”

Lawson “masterfully integrated activism, scholarship, and ministry in his extraordinary leadership,” says G. Sujin Pak, STH dean. “A rare and great light has left us; yet his light will shine on for years to come.”

Lawson is survived by his wife, Dorothy, their sons, Morris and John (a third son, Seth, died in 2019), his brother, and three grandchildren.

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The following is STH Dean G. Sujin Pak's full quote:

“Rev. James M. Lawson, Jr. masterfully integrated activism, scholarship, and ministry in his extraordinary leadership for nonviolence, justice, and peace. Nonviolence saturated everything he did from his iconic Civil Rights work to advocacy as a Methodist pastor to his visionary interfaith activities. He simultaneously embodied boldness and gentleness, humility and resoluteness, and an exquisite integration of spiritual, social, and political transformation. A rare and great light has left us; yet his light will shine on for years to come.”

STH Dean Emerita, Mary Elizabeth Moore, offered the following statement:

"James Lawson was one of the greatest people I ever knew. As a fierce prophet and loving priest, he was a consistent theoretician, practitioner, and teacher of non-violent resistance. A few years ago, he shared a childhood story with BU students. Young Jim came home from an errand after fighting with a white boy who had shouted insulting words at him. Jim’s mother saw his face when he returned and, continuing to cook, she said, “There must be a better way.” Those words grew in him, and Jim Lawson became a lifetime purveyor of non-violence, refusing to fight in the Korean War; coaching and leading lunch counter sit-ins in his young years; becoming Martin Luther King, Jr.’s leading guide in non-violent resistance; and leading the church, city, nation, and interfaith organizations through dreadful conflicts toward “a better way.” I was privileged to work alongside Jim Lawson in the church and to be personally touched by his life. I have lost a mentor, and the world has lost a beacon of hope. Yet, he has prepared us well to continue in the light he carried."

Reverend Russell J. Peppe (STH ’62)

By sthalum June 23rd, 2024 in Alumni/ae Deaths

This obituary was originally posted by Sun Journal and can be found here.

Russell Peppe, 86, of Lewiston, set sail for that Far Country from which no traveler returns on April 4, 2024.

He was born the eldest son of Michael Peppe Sr. and Lillian (Cooley) Peppe of East Bridgewater, Mass. on Dec. 11, 1937.

He received his basic education in the East Bridgewater schools, graduating from East Bridgewater High School with honors, letters in varsity track and football, and with the prestigious Arian Medal for his many contributions to the school’s music program. He furthered his education at Colby College in Waterville, where he received the Scholar’s Medal in Mathematical Logic and recognition for an undefeated season in wrestling. He continued at Boston University where he received two Masters’ degrees majoring in the fields of social ethics, moral philosophy, and theology, and the University of Edinburgh, Scotland. One of the highlights of his stay in beautiful Scotland was the opportunity to play the drums for a set of songs by noted jazz singer, Sarah Vaughan.

Following his education, he settled in Maine to live and serve United Methodist churches in Cape Porpoise, Gorham, Auburn, Bangor, New Sharon, Farmington, and Bath before retiring in Lewiston. He was happy to have been named Pastor Emeritus of Auburn UMC in recognition of an association of fifty years with the parish. He taught as adjunct faculty at Boston University and at the University of Maine, Portland-Gorham (now the University of Southern Maine), and enjoyed hiking, camping, reading, writing, spook movies, and photography. He kept an extensive collection of Nikon cameras, both digital and film, and enjoyed most using his film cameras to create the black and white negatives that he then developed and printed on siler gelatin paper in his darkrooms, portraits of friends and family being his preferred subjects.

He was predeceased by his mother and father; as well as his sister Diane, an accomplished psychiatric nurse; and his son Brian.

He is survived by his brothers Richard and Michael Jr., his cousins Judy and Jeannie; his children, Eric and his wife Helen, Lisa and her partner Rick, Brian’s partner Hannah; and his seven grand and step-grandchildren, Alexander and his wife Kati, Robyn and her partner Kit, Michael, Joey, Morgan, Kayla, and Lily (also known as Alex); and by many wonderful friends.

His ashes will be scattered on a river in Maine to then be carried on its current to the sea and beyond.

Reverend Jack S. Spangler, (STH’42)

By sthalum June 23rd, 2024 in Alumni/ae Deaths

This obituary was originally posted by The Orange County Register and can be found here.

Spangler, Jack S., 90, a resident of Santa Ana for over 25 years passed away on March 25, 2007. Jack was born on July 8,1916 in Somerset, Pennsylvania. He holds a bachelors degree from Geneva College and in 1942 he received a Masters in Sacred Theology from Boston University. Jack was a clergyman for 35 years. He is survived by his loving family, wife, Barbara Kennedy Spangler; sons, David and Scott; step-sons, Bruce and Brian; 5 grandchildren and 3 great grandchildren. A celebration of Jack’s life will be held on April 1, 2007 at 2:00 p.m. at La Chiquita Restaurant in Santa Ana. In lieu of flowers donations may be made to St. Paul’s Chapel, Dutch Neck, Waldoboro, Maine 04572 Pacific View Mortuary