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Community Investigation Documents Drug Use and Pedophilia on Tacoma Eastside
Centoilia Maldonado Vasquez, Oaxaca Community Leader
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"Dialogue on Economic Justice and the Church"
| What | Associated Ministries human rights Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies discussion labor and unions Tacoma Ministerial Alliance poverty A. Phillip Randolph Institute-Tacoma Chapter UWT-Black Student Union |
|---|---|
| When |
2008-02-26 12:00
2008-02-26 13:30
2008-02-26 from 12:00 to 13:30 |
| Where | St John Baptist Church, 2001 South J St (at 20th), church parking. |
| Contact Name | Associated Ministries |
| Contact Phone | 253-383-3056 x119 |
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Rev. James Lawson speaking on how clergy, church members, advocates for workers, and the poor can combine forces
How can clergy and church members and advocates for workers and the poor combine forces? Rev. Lawson led church
support for King in the historic Memphis
sanitation strike, in Los Angeles as part of the Justice
For Janitors union organizing of Latino, Black, and immigrant workers in the 1990s, and walks with union,
church, and social justice leaders
everywhere.
"Speaking to Lawson is the closest most of us will ever come to speaking with Martin Luther King, Jr., who called him the leading theorist of nonviolence in the United States," says Prof. Michael Honey of the University of Washington-Tacoma. Lawson, aged 79, was one of the principal theoreticians and tacticians of the American civil rights movement and continues to train activists in nonviolence. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lawson)
Rev. Lawson, an African-American Methodist minister, chose nonviolence as his weapon
and became one of its leading advocates. At Baldwin Wallace College, in Ohio, he met pacifist labor
and civil rights organizer A.J. Muste, and
went to prison for draft refusal during the Korean
War. He explored Africa and served as a
missionary in India, where he studied
Gandhi.
Martin Luther King asked Lawson to come south to teach nonviolence as
his education director. Lawson did and helped organize many of the major civil rights
struggles in the South, going to jail repeatedly. Vanderbilt University expelled him from its Divinity School
for his activism, so Lawson graduated from Boston
University, King's alma mater,
instead. (Vanderbilt has now appointed him as
Distinguished University Professor, and he
is teaching courses there on civil rights history.) Lawson later moved to Los
Angeles to pastor Homan Methodist Church and helped to organize Justice for Janitors, a union campaign among
low-wage Black and Hispanic workers.
One of the most important advocates of church
support for activism on behalf of unions and the working poor, a brilliant speaker and deep thinker, Lawson
remains one of this country's most important cross-over leaders, supporting civil rights and labor and human emancipation.