It is important for us to recall that Martin Luther King Jr. made several visits to Oberlin, but his first, in February 1957, proved momentous for the future of the civil rights movement. The 381-day Montgomery bus boycott, during which King began to make a name for himself in the movement, had just ended. King spoke at First Church on “Justice Without Violence” and “The New Negro in the South” and at a Finney Chapel assembly on “The Montgomery Story.” After one of these lectures, theologian Harvey Cox, then the YMCA-YWCA secretary at Oberlin College, arranged for King to meet an African-American first-year at the Oberlin Graduate School of Theology, James M. Lawson, Jr.

Lawson, the son of a militantly anti-racist Methodist minister and his pacifist wife, had declared himself a conscientious objector at the age of 19 and was sentenced to federal prison. After his release in 1951, Lawson returned to his BA studies at Baldwin-Wallace College, but also spent time meeting with Methodist student groups at Oberlin and elsewhere to talk about pacifism and non-violence.

Following graduation, Lawson traveled as a short-term Methodist missionary to India, where he continued his study of Gandhian non-violence. Upon his return in 1956, Lawson enrolled at the Oberlin Graduate School of Theology, which, at the time, probably enrolled more black students than all other seminaries combined. Among the courses Lawson took was The Pacifism of the Early Church: Jesus through Constantine. When Lawson and King met at the beginning of Lawson’s second semester, King was so impressed by the student’s knowledge of the theory and practice of non-violence that he insisted Lawson must immediately come south to help the movement.

Lawson transferred to Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, TN. The Fellowship of Reconciliation employed him as field secretary to teach local groups about Christian peacemaking and reconciliation in race relations. Soon, Lawson was building the base for the Nashville lunch-counter sit-ins of 1960. Central to this process were the workshops in non-violence Lawson offered at local churches and attended by students from the several historically black academic institutions in the area, as well as by Vanderbilt ministerial students.

In Lawson’s workshops, the participants explored the roots of segregation and how to apply the Gandhian theory of non-violence, blended together with Christian principles, in actions toward what Lawson called “constructive social change.” During the sit-ins, Lawson was arrested along with many others who became leaders in the civil rights movement, including current Georgia Congressman John Lewis. The lunch counters were successfully de-segregated, but because arrest violated Vanderbilt’s code of conduct, the racially conservative Board of Trust and the chancellor (ironically, also a scholar of the New Testament) had an excuse for expelling Lawson. Many Vanderbilt faculty tendered their resignations in support of Lawson, and he was re-admitted, but decided instead to complete his studies at Boston University.

Julian Bond, then active in student protests, said, “Lawson was like a bad younger brother, pushing King to do more, to be more militant, to extend non-violence — just to do more … He envisioned a militant non-violence … You didn’t have to wait for the evil to come to you, you could go to the evil.” King himself called Lawson “the greatest teacher of non-violence in America” and “the mind of the movement.”

In 1962, Lawson became pastor of Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis, where he continued his activism, most notably in the 1968 strike by black sanitation workers. Union leader Jerry Wurf recalled that the Memphis city leaders “feared Lawson for the most interesting of all reasons — he was a totally moral man, and totally moral men you can’t manipulate and you can’t buy and you can’t hustle.” Lawson persuaded King to come to Memphis to support the strikers, and it was there that King was assassinated. In 1974, Lawson accepted the position of senior pastor at Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles. Although retired from that ministry, he continues to be active as a teacher and in movements for labor rights, immigrant rights, civil rights and international peace.

In 2010, Oberlin College awarded James M. Lawson, Jr. an honorary doctorate. Dr. Lawson returns to Oberlin today for a week’s residence as a distinguished visiting lecturer. At an Oberlin College convocation at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, March 3, at First Church, where James Lawson and Martin Luther King had their initial meeting in 1957, he will speak on “The Influence of Plantation Capitalism on Today’s Human Rights.”