The Rev James Lawson, Martin Luther King’s right-hand man in the Civil Rights struggle – obituary

James Lawson, first right, back row, with Martin Luther King, centre, and other civil rights leaders in 1960 - Howard Sochurek/The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Rev James Lawson, who has died aged 95, was a civil rights activist who stood alongside Martin Luther King Jr in the struggle for social justice in America; jailed for refusing to fight in the Korean War, he went on to lead workshops in non-violence for young black people. When King was assassinated in 1968, Lawson led the silent march in Memphis held in his honour.

“The politics of Jesus and the politics of God are that people should be fed, that people have access to life, that people should be treated equally and justly,” Lawson once said. “Especially the marginalised. The poor, the illiterate, the jailed, the hungry, the naked – those are all terms Jesus uses. The alien, the stranger, the foreigner, you’re supposed to treat them as you do yourself.”

He played a leading role in promoting desegregation in Nashville, where in 1960 restaurants, cinemas, buses and the like were opened up. His ability to bridge divides was never more apparent than when he was leading a civil rights protest in the city and a white man in a biker jacket spat on him.

Lawson calmly asked him if he had a handkerchief; the man, disarmed, gave him one, and the two went on to have a long talk about motorbikes. As David Halberstam recounted in his book The Children, the Reverend “had managed to find a subject which they both shared and had used it in a way that made each of them more human in the eyes of the other”.

James Morris Lawson Jr was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, on September 22 1928, the sixth of nine children, and grew up in Massillon, Ohio; his Jamaican-born mother was Philane, née Cover, while his African father James was a Methodist minister, like his father before him.

Lawson, left, with union leaders following the resolution of a strike by Memphis sanitation workers in 1968; Martin Luther King had been in the city to help settle the dispute when he was assassinated a fortnight earlier - Bettmann

A formative experience came at the age of 10 when a younger white boy hurled a racial epithet at him; James slapped him across the face, went home and told his family what he had done, expecting praise. Instead, his mother scolded him, saying, “What good did that do, Jimmy?”

That set the boy on a new path, and he followed in the steps of his father and grandfather, receiving his ministry licence while he was still at high school. He studied sociology at the Methodist-founded Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, and while there, he received an Army call-up.

Though he could have deferred as a trainee minister, he refused what he saw as a “moral and ethical sell-out” and instead went to prison, serving 13 months of a two-year sentence.

After returning to college to finish his degree, Lawson worked as a missionary in Nagpur, India, where he studied satyagraha, the form of non-violent resistance and civil disobedience advocated by Mahatma Gandhi.

Returning to the US in 1956, he undertook graduate studies at Oberlin College in Ohio, where he met Martin Luther King, who was on a speaking visit. King pleaded with Lawson to head down South to put his beliefs into practice, saying: “Don’t wait. Come now.”

Lawson at the prison where Martin Luther King's assassin James Earl Ray was being held - RLFE Pix/Alamy

Lawson duly enrolled in the divinity department at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, leading workshops for King’s new organisation, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, of which he went on to become director of non-violent education.

In 1961 he was one of the first “Freedom Riders” to be arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, seeking desegregated travel, and in 1965 he was one of the many protesters infamously beaten by police during a march for voting rights in Selma, Alabama.

Three years later King travelled to Memphis to support a strike of sanitation workers organised by Lawson. There, he was assassinated by James Earl Ray – to whom Lawson ministered in jail, even conducting his prison wedding in 1978.

While the Civil Rights struggle was won, at least in legal terms, Lawson was not done, opposing the Vietnam War and continuing to champion racial integration. In 1974 he became senior pastor at Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles, and though he retired in 1999 he carried on teaching non-violence and supporting causes such as the unions, gay rights, abortion access and a more liberal immigration policy.

James Lawson married, in 1959, Dorothy Wood. She survives him with their two sons; another son predeceased him.

James Lawson, born September 22 1928, died June 9 2024

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