Lawson put aside his ministerial deferment and went to prison as an conscientious objector to the Korean War in the 1950s.  Following the teachings of Jesus, Gandhi, Muste, and King, he has followed a nonviolent path throughout most of his 79 years.  Learn and discuss how nonviolence can be used to put young people and others on a path toward life-long pursuit of justice and personal fulfillment, to end war and create a better world.

"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.