The Rev. James Lawson, civil rights leader who led Nashville lunch counter sit-ins and Freedom Rides, dies at 95
LOS ANGELES — James M. Lawson Jr., a Methodist minister who became the teacher of the civil rights movement, training hundreds of youthful protesters in nonviolent tactics that made the Nashville lunch counter sit-ins a model for fighting racial inequality in the 1960s, has died. He was 95.
Lawson, who for decades worked as a pastor, labor movement organizer and university professor, died Sunday of cardiac arrest en route to a Los Angeles hospital, his son J. Morris Lawson III told The Washington Post. He was 95.
Recruited by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Lawson organized and led weekly workshops on nonviolent action in Nashville and other hot spots of the movement. The workshops trained many future leaders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, including the late Rep. John Lewis.
“I truly felt ... that he was God-sent,” Lewis once wrote of Lawson. “There was something of a mystic about him, something holy, so gathered, about his manner. ...The man was a born teacher, in the truest sense of the word.”
Called “the leading nonviolence theorist” by King, Lawson had studied Gandhi’s philosophy in India
