[Sosfbay-discuss] Fwd: War, Violence & Religion with Jim Lawson

Mon Jul 20 08:10:23 PDT 2009

 Dear Green Friends,

NONVIOLENCE is one of the 10 Key Values of the Green Party and one of the reasons why I became an active, registered Green.  To anyone who might be in Southern California, see below a rare opportunity to interact with one of the great theorists of non-violence of our time. 

*  *  * 

JAMES MORRIS LAWSON, JR. (born September 22, 1928 in Uniontown, Pennsylvania),[1] was a leading theoretician and tactician of nonviolence within the American Civil Rights Movement. He continues to be active in training activists in nonviolence.

Born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, Lawson grew up in Massillon, Ohio. While a freshman at Baldwin Wallace College in Berea, Ohio, he joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), an organization founded by A.J. Muste, and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE).  FOR and CORE advocated nonviolent resistance to racism and conducted sit-ins in some northern cities in the late 1940s.

Lawson declared himself a conscientious objector and refused to report for the draft in 1951. He served fourteen months in prison after refusing to take either a student or ministerial deferment.

After his release from prison, Lawson went as a Methodist missionary to Nagpur, India, where he studied satyagraha, the principles of nonviolence resistance that Mahatma Gandhi and his followers had developed. He returned to the United States in 1955, entering the Graduate School of Theology at Oberlin College in Ohio.

One of his Oberlin professors introduced him to Martin Luther King
, Jr., who had led the Montgomery Bus Boycott in Montgomery, Alabama and had also embraced Gandhi's principles of nonviolent resistance. King urged Lawson to come South, telling him "Come now. We don't have anyone like you down there."

Lawson moved to Nashville, Tennessee and enrolled at the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University, where he served as the southern director for FOR and began conducting nonviolence training workshops for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. While in Nashville, Lawson met and mentored a number of young students at Vanderbilt, Fisk University, and other area schools in the tactics of nonviolent direct action.[2] Lawson trained many of the future leaders of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, among them Diane Nash, James Bevel, Marion Barry, Bernard Lafayette and John Lewis.

In 1959 and 1960 these and other Lawson-trained activists then launched the Nashville sit-ins to challenge segregation in downtown stores. Along with activists from Atlanta, Georgia and elsewhere in the South, they formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in April 1960. SNCC and Lawson's students played a leading role in the Open Theater Movement, the Freedom Rides, the 1963 March on Washington, Mississippi Freedom Summer the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the Birmingham Children's Crusade, the Selma Voting Rights Movement, and the Chicago Open Housing Movement over the next few years. 

Lawson became pastor of Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis, Tennessee in 1962. In 1968, when black sanitation workers we
nt on strike for higher wages and union recognition after two of their co-workers were accidentally crushed to death, Reverend Lawson served as chairman of their strike committee. 

Reverend Lawson invited Dr. King to Memphis in April 1968 to dramatize their struggle, which had adopted the slogan I am a Man. Dr. King delivered his famous "Mountaintop" speech in support of the strike in Memphis on 1968-04-03, the day before his assassination.

Reverend Lawson moved to Los Angeles in 1974 to lead Holman United Methodist Church[1] where he served for 25 years before retiring in 1999. He has continued to train activists in nonviolence and to work in support of a number of causes, including immigrants' rights in the United States and the rights of Palestinians, opposition to the war in Iraq, and workers' rights to a living wage.  Conservative demagogues Sean Hannity and Kevin McCullough criticized Lawson's remarks at a September 11, 2006 panel discussion at Vanderbilt University entitled "9/11: A Time for Reflection". He had called Christianity "the most violent religion in the world" and in addition referred to the United States as the "number one enemy of peace and justice in the world.

I am posting this here because, as I said before, NONVIOLENCE is one of the 10 Key Values of the Green Party.  A lot of well-meaning frustrated progressives hung up on the failed, morally bankrupt, mid-20th Century ideologies romanticizing violent revolution have forgotten this.  It may not be "sexy" but disciplined non-viol
ent action gets things done.  I have personally participated in workshops with Jim Lawson a couple of times.  He needs people to press him not to rest on his laurels, but help us think through the application of classic theory to our current struggles. 

-----Original Message-----

I've been asked to spread the word on this event. 

War, Violence
& Religion 

The
Rev. Dr. James Lawson

Whom
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called “the leading theorist and strategist
of non-violence in the world.”

Dr.
John B. Cobb, Jr.

Emeritus
Professor, Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Graduate
 School, Co-founder,
Progressive Christians Uniting

Moderator: Bonnie
Boswell of the SGI-USA

Performing Artist:
Stephen L. Fiske with Crystal Davis

What

An important
dialogue of the times and a call to action.  Two historical figures of the
Civil Rights Movement and Theology

discuss the
explosive topic of “War, Violence and Religion.”  Is war and
violence justified by any of our Religious/Spiritual

traditions wh
en done
in the service of combating oppression, tyranny, injustice or in self
defense?  

ICUJP
invites you to witness and explore these and related issues with Q&A.

When

Monday, July 20 - 7:00 - 9:30 PM

(ICUJP
meets every Friday Morning - 7:00 - 9:00 AM - same location)

Where

Immanuel
Presbyterian Church (side entrance)

3300 Wilshire Blvd.
 L.A. 90010

@
Berendo St. just west of Vermont

FREE, Limited Early
Bird  Parking in Rear

(Alternative Parking @ UTLA
Structure - Berendo St.
- North of Wilshire)

Who

ICUJP: Interfaith Communities United
for Justice & Peace

www.icujp.org        (213)
626-2265       icujp at pacbell.net 

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