Unique?
The Reverend Dr. James M. Lawson, Jr. grasped faster than almost any other American practitioner the compatibility of the lessons from Gandhi’s struggles and the types of campaigns of civil resistance that were and are necessary in the United States. The 1955–56 Montgomery bus boycott had an impact that was South-wide, as black onlookers who observed the 361-day successful Alabama campaign concluded that nonviolent direct action could work. In Nashville, a group of clergy and laity judged that what had occurred in Montgomery was the most momentous advance for African Americans since the Civil War and the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation to free the slaves, and that it must be repeated. As Lawson describes it, they determined that such achievements should be undertaken again in Nashville, then elsewhere, and still again and again.
In 1957, the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. brought Lawson south. A black Methodist minister and conscientious objector in the Korean war, Lawson was sentenced to three years in federal prisons in West Virginia and Kentucky. He served 13 months of the original sentence (April 1951–May 1952), before the United Methodist Church persuaded a federal court to release him to its Board of Missions, which sent him to teach in India. Even before leaving for India he judged that it was possible for a massive nonviolent revolution to be staged in the U.S. South, where, he said, segregation “is much like the ‘untouchables’ of India.” By April 1953, he arrived at the crossroads of India, barely four years after Gandhi’s assassination in 1948. There he spent three years teaching at Hislop College in Nagpur in Maharashtra, while also traveling to meet individuals who had worked alongside Gandhi in various struggles, thereby gaining practical knowledge from firsthand participants while visiting sites of action. He was not the first or only one to grasp the applicability of the Indian struggles to the American context, but he was the most logical in methodically applying its lessons to the U.S. experience. After returning to the United States, Lawson encountered King at Oberlin College, Ohio, where he was studying, and where King was speaking. They were both twenty-eight years of age. King exclaimed, “Don’t wait! Come now! You’re badly needed. We don’t have anyone like you!” King was referring to Lawson’s knowledge of nonviolent action as an approach to fighting for justice. Becoming southern field secretary for the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), by January 1958, Lawson was based in Nashville.
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