James Lawson at First Baptist Church in Nashville, March 1960
Among the photos lining the Civil Rights Room in the Nashville Public Library downtown is one of a young James Lawson being arrested in 1960 outside the First Baptist Church. Lawson was arrested after co-coordinating nonviolent protests seeking to desegregate lunch counters in downtown Nashville. Despite vicious verbal and physical attacks from white hecklers, the protests were ultimately successful. The demonstrators remained nonviolent, and Nashville became one of the first major Southern cities to begin desegregating public spaces.
Those sit-ins, and the techniques protesters used, helped establish Lawson as a prominent civil rights leader. He died at age 95 on June 9 in Los Angeles. Just three months ago, Lawson filmed a video message that was shared during a Nashville event honoring fellow civil rights leader Diane Nash, who attended Lawson’s nonviolent training sessions many decades ago. Elliott Robinson — program specialist in the Special Collections Division at the Nashville Public Library — tells the Scene that Lawson visited the room in 2022 and shared his memories about the day those photos were taken.
The Rev. Lawson dedicated his life to nonviolence and social justice through his teachings as a college professor, his ministry as a Methodist pastor and his activism — including not only the Nashville sit-ins, but also the Freedom Rides, the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike (during which Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated) and much more.
The city held a dedication ceremony at Diane Nash Plaza Saturday — a good reminder that we should have a civil rights museum
Lawson was studying theology at Oberlin College in Ohio when he met King, who encouraged him to immediately come to the South after learning about his dedication to nonviolent protest tactics — tactics that were impelled by Lawson’s mother and inspired by Mahatma Gandhi. Lawson answered the call, and enrolled in Vanderbilt University’s Divinity School in 1958. Around this time, he began teaching nonviolent direct action workshops to Nashville students from Black colleges and universities and helped form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. The workshops used intensive role-playing and preparation to prepare students to face intense racism, harassment and violence, using the tactic of nonviolent resistance.
“We used the movement as a training ground,” Lawson told fellow civil rights figure Bill Barnes in a 2003 interview provided to the Scene by Robinson. “We continued workshops, we continued mass meetings, we continued teaching about nonviolence. We encouraged our people to take their personal experience on the front lines and appropriate and understand them in terms of themselves, their own growth, and the nonviolent strategy. I think that this was a better preparation than even I had known, though I think that what I did was at least very, very good for the time. And the net result was that it persuaded a number of people that this was a work that they could do, and it must be done. So we produced a quality of leadership that no other movement had produced. And that’s the other thing that Nashville people ought to take some pride in, and that is that we — that for the next decade or more, so many people out of the Nashville scene became some of the vanguard people, in Birmingham, the Freedom Ride campaign in ’61.”
Among Lawson’s trainees were John Lewis, C.T. Vivian, Bernard Lafayette and James Bevel. But their activism came with a cost. Not only were protesters maliciously harassed and assaulted by white counterprotesters — many were also arrested, and Lawson was expelled from Vanderbilt, where students and Divinity School faculty protested the expulsion.
From 2006 until 2009, Lawson returned to Vanderbilt as a distinguished visiting professor. In 2022, the university launched the James Lawson Institute for the Research and Study of Nonviolent Movements. Included among the institute’s teaching are trainings that follow the same model Lawson used. Metro Nashville Public Schools’ new high school in Bellevue was also named after Lawson in 2023.
So much has changed since the Nashville sit-ins, yet so many of the same racial and socioeconomic struggles remain — and there are new challenges.
“In some ways, the methods don’t change,” says Phillis Isabella Sheppard, executive director of the James Lawson Institute. “But … because access to weapons of destruction and death are so accessible, it changes the questions in terms of preparing students to be engaged in nonviolent work.”
The culture of youth activism remains strong in Nashville, and the proliferation of gun violence has been a huge driver of that — particularly in the wake of last year’s Covenant School shooting. Other youth-led demonstrations have included students protesting in support of Palestinians in Gaza, protests organized by a group of teens in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, and young activists’ occupation of Legislative Plaza for 62 nights, demanding, in part, that a bust of a former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard be removed from the state Capitol.
There are many more Nashvillian civil rights figures we should all keep in mind
Writing about Lawson in 2021, Scene contributor Betsy Phillips reminded us that, while we need to remember Lawson’s contributions, we also need to remember all the ordinary people who did the work before his time here. Likewise, Dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School Yolanda Pierce reminds us that dedicating a life to social change and justice doesn’t mean just going to protests, but also means taking all kinds of continuous action.
“We really honor his life by doing the work locally,” says Pierce. “For me, it starts right here, thinking about Vanderbilt, thinking about Nashville, thinking about the ways that justice and love and nonviolence and those ethics of compassion can really mean something for my neighbors right here in the city in which I live. And then it expands from there. But I hope that this is a moment that is a clarion call to the city of Nashville to say, ‘We honor him by being compassionate and just to our neighbors.’ And that means things like affordable housing and more public transit. The things that make for human dignity, because that is really what Lawson represented — human dignity.”
