Understanding Militant Non-violence within Memphis’ Modern Civil Rights Movement: The Leadership and Witness of the Rev. James M Lawson Jr (original) (raw)
Related papers
On the Role of Violence and Non-Violence in the Development of the American Civil Rights Movement
This paper seeks to address and challenge a commonly held narrative about the period of American history known as the civil rights movement. It demonstrates that characterisation of this movement as one which met with success in its early years when non-violent strategies were pursued, but which degenerated into violence and failure in later years is inaccurate. Although it is easier to quantify the successes in the civil rights movement in the earlier half of the 1960s, legislative change did not always mean material change in people’s lives; and the aims and goals which became prominent later on in this period necessitated more wholesale structural change which was counter-posed to the capitalist system in America. Violence in the form of self-defence was therefore commonly pursued in the early civil rights era, albeit by sections of the black working class operating outside of formal organisations. Furthermore, it is argued that generally understood definitions of violence – used often to condemn elements of the civil rights movement – do not adequately capture dynamics of structural violence existing through the state and class structure of American society in the 1960s. The paper therefore concludes that it is necessary to challenge this typical narrative of the civil rights movement due to its presentation of both the legitimacy and success of non-violent and violent protest more generally which has negative implications for contemporary protest movements.
Developing an American Ahimsa: The Rev. James M. Lawson Jr.'s Paradigm of Protest
2009
This thesis is the product of a question I asked four years ago: why was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis in 1968? I found an answer easily enough, and that was James M. Lawson Jr. asked King to come to Memphis. But how Lawson knew King and why King came to Memphis in spite of his closest advisors' warnings is a much longer story than this thesis can or should tell. However, I was compelled that Lawson knew King so well, and so I traced his life backwards from Memphis to his upbringing. This work has occupied much of my time at Rhodes College. Dr. Charles McKinney has been a source of constant inspiration and a model of academic rigor, and his unwavering support and assistance from my first semester until know has been invaluable. Dr. Steven Haynes and Dr. Timothy Huebner supervised and directed my first in-depth study of Lawson during the 2007 Rhodes Institute for Regional Studies, providing guidance and insight as I focused on Lawson's activity in Memphis, TN from the time he arrived here in 1962 until the eve of the sanitation strike in 1968. My research on Lawson continued in the fall of 2007 under the supervision of Dr. Gail Murray in a seminar on the Memphis Sanitation Strike of 1968. I began formal work on this thesis through a directed inquiry in the spring of 2008 under the tutelage of Dr. McKinney and began writing the thesis under the supervision of Dr. Luther Ivory in the fall of 2008. This work, like all historical work, is the product of an ongoing dialectic between scholars and the past and so I owe a debt of gratitude to my advisors mentioned above, and to Wesley Hogan for stunning scholarship and timely advice; to Ben Houston for his unpublished manuscript on Nashville; to Scott McDuffie for his thesis on Lawson; and to the History Department at Rhodes College for the inspiration, the faith and the insights borne from countless conversations on things only historians care about.
Power for the Powerless: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Late Theory of Civil Disobedience
Journal of Politics, 2020
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” has been canonized as an essential statement of the political theory of civil disobedience. This article examines the early reception of King’s essay and the development of the liberal idea of civil disobedience it has become synonymous with to argue that its canonization coincided with, and displaced, the radicalization of King’s developing thinking about disobedience. It examines published and archival writings from 1965 through 1968 to reconstruct King’s power-oriented theory of “mass” civil disobedience as it developed in response to the dual challenges of white backlash and Black Power. The basic challenge of mass civil disobedience is how to mobilize liberating acts of taking power without undercutting the possibility of transformative integration through sharing power. To articulate this dilemma, this article draws on an undertheorized category from John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice to conceptualize disobedience as a practice of militant love.
Gender & History, 2007
The non-violent demonstrations against racial segregation that took place in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 represent one of the major events in the history of the civil rights movement in the United States. Organised by Revd Martin Luther King Jr's Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the Birmingham campaign exposed the viciousness of southern racism. Pictures of peaceful black teenagers being felled by high-powered streams of water and of demonstrators being bitten by snarling police dogs shocked the United States and the world. However, although SCLC was genuinely committed to philosophical non-violence, the reminiscences of Andrew Young, the right-hand man of Martin Luther King during the 1960s, call attention to the ambivalent attitudes that the movement's non-violent protest strategy evoked among some male activists. Recalling the Birmingham demonstrations in his memoirs, Young expressed his concerns about two female student activists, Dorothy Cotton and Diane Bevel, who participated in peaceful protest marches. 'I had been brought up to respect women, and part of that respect was taking care for their safety', Young wrote. 'On the occasions that Dorothy and Diane did march, I stayed as far away from them as possible. I didn't trust myself not to defend them if they were attacked'. 1 Andrew Young's memories hint at the intricate relationship between violence, non-violence and manhood in the African American freedom struggle of the 1950s and 1960s. Young's understanding of what it meant to be a man challenged the movement's non-violent orthodoxy and implied an obligation to defend black women against racist attacks. Probing this gendered dimension of violence and non-violence in the civil rights movement can help us better understand the opposition that activists frequently encountered when organising in the Deep South. Concentrating on what sociologist Robert Connell has called 'marginalized' masculinities also sheds light on the meanings of defensive violence for those African Americans who complemented demonstrations and voter registration drives with armed self-defence. 2 Finally, a focus on gender allows us to comprehend some of the differences between the role of violence in the southern civil rights struggle and the Black Power movement.
Research in Social Movements, Conflicts, and Change , 2012
While it is generally well-known that nonviolent collective action was widely deployed in the U.S. southern civil rights movement, there is still much that we do not know about how that came to be. Drawing on primary data that consist of detailed semi-structured interviews with members of the Nashville nonviolent movement during the late 1950s and 1960s, we contribute unique insights about how the nonviolent repertoire was diffused into one movement current that became integral to moving the wider southern movement. Innovating with the concept of serially-linked movement schools—-locations where the deeply intense work took place, the didactic and dialogical labor of analyzing, experimenting, creatively translating, and re-socializing human agents in preparation for dangerous performance—we follow the biographical paths of carriers of the nonviolent Gandhian repertoire as it was learned, debated, transformed, and carried from India to the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR) and Howard University to Nashville (TN) and then into multiple movement campaigns across the South. Members of the Nashville movement core cadre—products of the Nashville movement workshop schools—were especially important because they served as bridging leaders by serially-linking schools and collective action campaigns. In this way they played critical roles in bridging structural holes (places where movement had yet to be successfully established) and were central to diffusing the movement throughout the South. Our theoretical and empirical approach contributes to the development of the dialogical perspective on movement diffusion generally and to knowledge about how the nonviolent repertoire became integral to the U.S. civil rights movement in particular.
Whether in his early role training non-violent protesters in the civil rights movement, his fateful invitation of Martin Luther King Jr to support striking sanitation workers in Memphis as pastor of Centenary Methodist Church in April 1968, or his ongoing fight to end violence and promote justice in the 21st century, United Methodist minister Rev. James Lawson has embodied Methodist ideals. The influence of his studies of Gandhi’s Satyagraha, a method of nonviolent resistance, while a Methodist missionary in India is frequently described by authors and by Lawson himself, and the mutual influences between him and fellow Boston University graduate MLK, Jr. are well-known. What has been investigated less is the ways in which the robust belief and social holiness demonstrated by John Wesley influenced and continue to be evident in this prophetic activist. This paper explores the Wesleyan theological soil surrounding the roots of Lawson’s pacifism. (Originally presented at American Academy of Religion's Annual Meeting, Atlanta, 2015; This version published METHODIST HISTORY, April 2016, Volume IV Number 3)
"Tough Love": The Political Theology of Civil Disobedience
Perspectives on Politics, 2020
Love is a key concept in the theory and history of civil disobedience yet it has been purposefully neglected in recent debates in political theory. Through an examination of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s paradoxical notion of "aggressive love," I offer a critical interpretation of love as a key concept in a vernacular black political theology, and the consequences of love's displacement by law in liberal theories of civil disobedience. The first section locates the origins of aggressive love in an earlier generation of black theologians who looked to India's anticolonial struggle to reimagine the dignity of the oppressed as "creative survival." The second contextualizes King's early sermons on moral injury and self-respect within this tradition to reinterpret Stride toward Freedom's account of the dignity-enhancing effects of nonviolent resistance as the triumph of love over fear. The third considers the implications of these arguments for conceptualizing the moral psychology of the white citizen and its consequences for contemporary debates over the ideological uses of Civil Rights history. The call to respond to oppression with aggressive love illustrates the paradoxical character of civil disobedience obscured by legal accounts as well as by criticisms of the very idea of "civil" disobedience. This is the paradox of affirming civility while enacting disobedience in order to bind political confrontation with political pedagogy.
Selma to Montgomery: Nonviolent movement analysis and discussion, 2019
From 21st March to 25th March 1965, thousands of civil-rights protestors marched down Highway 80 from Selma to Montgomery. Highway 80 acted as a gateway for many Black Americans to vent their frustration with voter rights, especially within southern states. Dr Martin Luther King initiated the marches and chose the Selma to Montgomery March as a testing ground for his black voter registration campaign. These marches ultimately led to vast changes in the way many viewed voter registration and it prompted Congress to pass one of the most important civil rights laws in history. This assignment focuses on how non-violent civil-rights movements can achieve long-lasting change in society and how they have shaped future civil-rights movements. This assignment utilises a variety of different sources including; eyewitness accounts from the bright light of ours: Stories from the voting rights fight, journal articles that include picturing equality: Exploring Civil Rights’ Marches through Photographs, and a selection of books written about the events that transpired. In terms of theoretical approaches, this assignment encompasses a multiplicity of social movement theories including, deprivation theory, political process theory (PPT) and structural strain theory. These theories confirm how non-violent movements engender long-lasting change in society.