James M. Lawson, Jr. (Baldwin Wallace ’51), a minister and key activist in the Civil Rights Movement, passed into the Chapter Eternal in 2024. Lawson studied sociology at Baldwin Wallace and joined Beta Sigma Tau Fraternity, which later merged with Pi Lambda Phi in 1960.
Fostering peaceful protest
Following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather, Lawson became a Methodist minister and after graduation, he traveled to India to become a missionary. There he studied nonviolent resistance developed by Gandhi and his followers.
When he returned home as a graduate student in 1956, he was introduced to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. who also embraced nonviolent resistance. Dr. King convinced him to move to the south to teach civil rights activists the principles of peaceful protest.
Lawson began divinity studies at Vanderbilt University, but was expelled for organizing lunch counter sit-ins and other nonviolent protests in 1960. He would also suffer arrests, beatings and other indignities as a protester, and one of the earliest Freedom Riders. But he never wavered.
Lawson said in an interview with the Fellowship of Reconciliation,
“I came to recognize that walking the extra mile, turning the other cheek, praying for the enemy, and seeing the enemy as a fellow human being was a resistance movement.”
He continued to play a leading role in the March on Washington, Freedom Summer, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the Children’s Crusade in Birmingham, the 1965 Selma Voting Rights Movement, the Chicago Freedom Movement, and the Anti-Vietnam War Movement.
