James M. Lawson Jr., a top strategist of Dr. King, has died at the age of 95

The Rev. James M. Lawson Jr., a civil rights strategist to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who taught protesters the painful techniques of nonviolence and fought against racial injustice in America for five decades, died Sunday en route to a Los Angeles hospital. He was 95 and lived in Los Angeles.

The cause was cardiac arrest, said his son Morris Lawson III.

Armed with Mahatma Gandhi’s principles of civil disobedience, which he had studied as a missionary in India, Mr. Lawson, a Methodist minister whose great-grandfather escaped slavery, joined Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference as a teacher and organizer in 1958. Along with Ralph Abernathy, James L. Farmer Jr., Roy Wilkins and Bayard Rustin, he became one of the chief architects of the 1960’s civil rights struggle that spread across the South.

Dr. King called Mr. Lawson America’s leading theoretician of nonviolence. But he was also a traveling troubleshooter in a land of revelers where African Americans were beaten, shot, arrested and lynched. He conducted nonviolence workshops for protesters, sit-ins at segregated lunch counters, picketing and boycotting white-only stores, and campaigns to register black voters. He was often hauled off to jail.

In the turbulent 1960s, the strategy of nonviolence divided African Americans and their allies. Many viewed it as a sign of weakness—useless in the face of deep-rooted racial segregation, the brutality of the Ku Klux Klan, and the legal and psychological weapons of Jim Crow laws. They preferred more aggressive, confrontational tactics.

But Mr. Lawson believed that the best way to combat segregation was to shock the conscience of the nation through passive acceptance of the fist and the baton.

“It is only when hostility comes to the surface that people realize the character of our nation,” he said. “We probably cannot solve the problem without causing harm to people.”

Mr. Lawson’s seminars were not for the faint of heart. Volunteers were told what to expect – beatings in the streets, stripping and whipping in prison, broken jaws. They took part in lively role-playing exercises to learn how to respond. During a sit-in at a lunch counter, they were told to sit up straight, be polite and not fight back. And afterward: They were told to know the streets out of town, the location of shelters and the phone numbers to call when calls were possible.

In 1960, Lawson was expelled from Vanderbilt University’s theology department for organizing sit-ins at Nashville’s lunch counters. The expulsion sparked widespread protests, including faculty resignations, and damaged Vanderbilt University’s reputation for years. Decades later, university officials apologized, invited him back as a visiting professor, and honored him for his work on civil rights.

In 1961, Lawson helped coordinate the Freedom Riders who traveled across the South, enduring beatings and arrests, to break down racial barriers on intercity buses and trains. He rode a bus from Montgomery, Alabama, to Jackson, Mississippi, and testified in defense of 27 riders charged with refusing a police order to leave the white waiting room of a bus station in Jackson. All were sentenced to several months in prison.

In early 1968, Mr. Lawson was chief strategist for the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike, a dispute in which black workers were beaten by police and booed by white crowds during daily demonstrations. As sanitation and violence increased, civil rights leaders, most notably Dr. King, gathered in Memphis at Mr. Lawson’s behest. During the strike, Dr. King was killed by a sniper in his motel on April 4.

That night, as violence erupted across the country in response to the assassination, Lawson called for calm. Later, he led a march to be led by Dr. King, despite a court order. The strike, which lasted 65 days, was called off two weeks later.

(Like Dr. King’s family and others, Mr. Lawson never accepted the results of a government investigation that James Earl Ray was the sole killer. Mr. Ray confessed to the murder, recanted his testimony, pleaded guilty to avoid a death penalty trial, and was sentenced to 99 years in prison. Mr. Lawson performed Mr. Ray’s wedding ceremony in prison in 1978 and attended a memorial service after his death in 1998.)

James Morris Lawson Jr. was born on September 22, 1928, in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, one of ten children of Reverend James and Philane May (Cover) Lawson. The surname was adopted in honor of a man who had helped his paternal great-grandfather escape from slavery in Maryland to Canada. James’ father, one of the first black students to graduate from McGill University in Montreal, was an African Methodist Episcopal minister who settled in Massillon, Ohio, where James Jr. attended public schools. His mother was a seamstress.

Both his parents were ardent opponents of racial inequality, his mother a pacifist, his father a gun-wielding man. When he was ten, James hit a white boy who had uttered a racial slur. His mother rebuked him, and he resolved never to resort to violence again.

Mr. Lawson enrolled at Baldwin-Wallace College, a Methodist liberal arts college in Berea, Ohio, in 1947 and joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the Congress of Racial Equality, both of which were committed to passive resistance. His beliefs were tested in 1951 when he was convicted of resisting the draft for the Korean War. He served 13 months of a three-year sentence.

After completing his bachelor’s degree at Baldwin-Wallace University, Lawson went to India in 1953 to study Gandhi’s principles of nonviolence. In 1956, he enrolled in the theological department of Oberlin College. On campus, he met Dr. King and was persuaded to join his movement.

In 1958, he moved to Nashville, attended Vanderbilt theological school, and joined the local branch of the SCLC. For the next two years, he taught nonviolence and organized protests in Nashville and throughout the South. His students included John Lewis, who later became a congressman from Georgia, and Marion Barry, who later became mayor of Washington.

In 1959, Mr. Lawson married Dorothy Wood, a graduate of Tennessee State University. They had three sons. In addition to their son, Morris, he is survived by his wife, their son, John, a brother, Phillip, and three grandchildren. Their other son, Seth, died in 2019.

In 1960, Mr. Lawson co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which became a pillar of the civil rights movement. After being expelled from Vanderbilt, he enrolled at Boston University and earned a master’s degree in theology. He later pastored churches in Shelbyville, Tennessee, and Memphis, and served as director of education for Dr. King’s Leadership Conference.

In 1974, he moved to Los Angeles and became pastor of Holman United Methodist Church, a 2,700-member congregation that was his base for 25 years. He served as president of the Los Angeles SCLC and led many other human rights groups.

On a broader stage, he criticized gun laws, the international arms trade, America’s response to poverty, and its involvement in the wars in El Salvador, the Persian Gulf, and Iraq. He retired from the church in 1999, but continued to advocate for minorities, immigrants, union members, and lesbians and gays.

In 2006, Lawson returned to Vanderbilt as a distinguished visiting professor. White-haired and ever the provocateur, he looked out at a lecture hall full of students who had never seen anyone lynched and began with a question that seemed to span the years: “How many of you have experienced a hate crime yourself? Let’s raise our hands.”

Alex Traub contributed to the reporting.