Breaking White Supremacy by Gary Dorrien

Author:Gary Dorrien
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300205619
Publisher: Yale University Press

THE COMING OF THE YOUTH

King returned from India determined to carry out Gandhian nonviolence, while puzzling over what that would mean. He used the Institute on Nonviolent Resistance to Segregation to explore the answer, moving his annual summer gathering from Montgomery to Atlanta. In July 1959 the institute met at Spelman College. King, Rustin, Smiley, and James Lawson led workshops, and Walker joined the group as a session chair. King sat in the front row during Lawson’s workshop, which became a practice for him at SCLC gatherings, sending a message: the workshops were essential to SCLC’s work, and Lawson was a master teacher who would help the movement find its way.

King had met Lawson in February 1957 at Oberlin College, where Lawson was a graduate student in religious studies, and King gave three speeches at the invitation of Oberlin chaplain Harvey Cox. It took King only ten minutes of conversation at a luncheon to decide that the movement needed Lawson desperately and right away, not after Lawson earned a doctorate in theology at Yale, as he was planning. James Lawson was the son of a Methodist minister, James Lawson Sr., who fathered nine children in eight congregations in Massachusetts and New York before settling in Massillon, Ohio. Lawson was child number six, but the first boy. His father founded NAACP chapters wherever he moved, and he did not believe in nonviolence. Lawson’s mother, Philane, was the pacifist influence in his life, quietly teaching her son that violence never solved anything. Philane Lawson moved to the United States from Jamaica in her late teens and sent five of her children to college, taking for granted that her brilliant first son would go to college despite the family’s meager economic means. Lawson went to Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, a United Methodist school that supported his commitment to Christian pacifism—until it didn’t.108

A. J. Muste spoke at Baldwin-Wallace during Lawson’s freshman year, 1947, and Lawson joined FOR, deeply drawn to Muste’s kindness and religious faith. At the end of Lawson’s junior year, North Korean forces crossed the thirty-eighth parallel and he spurned all three of the draft deferments available to him. Lawson wanted no privileged status for being a student or a conscientious objector. He also abhorred the ministerial deferment, which bought off Christian leaders who should have taken a stand against war. Imprisoned for draft evasion in 1951, Lawson won less support from his supposedly progressive Christian college than he expected. Like many FOR workers, Lawson treated his year in prison as an opportunity to witness to Christ, which the Methodist Church respected, sending him to India as a missionary in 1952. Lawson taught for three years at a Presbyterian college in Nagpur, Hislop College. He thoroughly enjoyed the experience, studied Gandhian nonviolence, and felt tempted to stay, shaking his head at Indian Christians who scorned Gandhi. Then Montgomery erupted and Lawson pined to come home. From the beginning he identified with King and sought to follow his path.

Lawson had barely begun his studies at Oberlin, preparing for doctoral study, when King came to Oberlin.

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