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The Rev. James Lawson Jr., pastor of Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles, civil rights icon and personal friend of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. has died. His family said Lawson passed away on Sunday after a short illness. He was 95.
A minister for more than 50 years, Rev. Lawson served as Pastor of Holman on Adams Blvd. from 1974 to 1999, when he retired. During his lifetime, he spent decades working as a pastor, labor movement organizer and university professor.
Lawson first met Dr. King in 1957, after spending three years in India, studying about Mahatma Gandhi and his non-violent approach to achieving independence against British rule. Two years later, Dr. King would travel to India himself.
Both black pastors were 28 years old at the time and quickly discovered their shared respect and enthusiasm for Ghandi and nonviolent activism. During the Jim Crow period, when racial segregation in the South was upheld by law, King asked Lawson to join his civil rights movement.
Lawson became a top advisor to King, who called him “the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world.”
It was Lawson who organized the sanitation workers strike in 1968 that led to King’s assassination in Memphis. Lawson said getting the news made him feel “paralyzed” and “saddened.”
In the early days of his career, Lawson worked extensively in Tennessee, training up-and-coming activists like John Lewis and Marion Barry, the Freedom Riders, and many others on the basics on how to respond peacefully to racist laws and policies.
Because of Lawson’s work, Nashville became the first major city in the South to desegregate its downtown, on May 10, 1960.
Rev. Lawson was born September 22, 1928. As a young man, he refused to serve in the Korean War and spent a year in prison as a conscious objector. He recalled in an interview that his commitment to nonviolence began as a child. He told his mother that he slapped a boy in school who used a racial slur against him. His mother asked, “What good did that do?” That question changed his life.
