Civil Rights Advocate Stays Focused on King’s Dream

To listen to him, you might not know that he was a pivotal figure during the 1960s civil rights struggle and a confidant of the late Martin Luther King Jr.

You don’t hear him volunteering that he was the one who invited King to support striking garbage workers in Memphis, where the civil rights leader was assassinated. You don’t hear him divulging that he performed a wedding ceremony for King’s convicted assassin, James Earl Ray.

It’s not that the Rev. James Lawson of Los Angeles hesitates to talk about any of this, if he is asked. At 75, it would be easy for him to look back. But Lawson keeps looking ahead.

“The struggle continues,” he said. “It just has a new face.”

As the nation observes Martin Luther King Day today, the now-silver-haired Lawson, his face rounder than in those days of lunch-counter sit-ins and freedom rides 40 years ago, said King’s dream has yet to be fully realized.

Despite the fall of segregation laws and the enforcement of voting rights -- changes he called of “great significance” -- Lawson said last week that the nation must still face up to the “spiritual forces” of poverty, violence and sexism. The man many consider to have been King’s “chief theoretician” of nonviolent protest said overt racism may have ebbed but institutional racism remains.

“There’s something quite corrupt about the American psyche right now, quite, quite corrupt, quite alarming from my perspective,” he said during an interview. “We have sufficient numbers of people in this land who know how to rid us of poverty, sufficient human, financial, technological resources, that it must really grieve God to see people on the streets asking for food, veterans asking for work and the like.”

Such fighting words, friends say, are the quintessential Lawson -- preacher, practitioner of Gandhian nonviolence and civil rights advocate.

Although he retired in 1999 as senior pastor of the 2,700-member Holman United Methodist Church on West Adams Boulevard, Lawson was recently elected president of the Los Angeles chapter of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a group founded by King during the civil rights struggle. Lawson is also chairman of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, which is in the forefront of a Los Angeles campaign for a so-called living wage for hotel, garment and restaurant workers and others.

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Lawson became a founder of Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace, which consists of 200 member congregations and calls on religions “to stop blessing war” and violence in all its forms.

Increasingly, Lawson’s views reflect the thoughts of other African American leaders, who in recent days have spoken out against what they see as a failure to address pressing problems at home while pursuing a costly war in Iraq.

But, Lawson said, Democrats campaigning for their party’s presidential nomination haven’t done much better than the Bush administration. “I don’t know if they’re that helpful, even to the point of helping the American people to frame what the questions are or what the issues are -- or what the possibilities are,” he said.

“How to get the American people to see that our issue is not the enemy on the outside, but our own fears on the inside. That’s the big issue. How to get us to see that a society that’s spending more on warfare than the well-being of their own people is already morally bankrupt,” Lawson said. “It is in grave danger of losing its own soul, its own visions for the future.”

Since retiring, Lawson said, he has more time for study, reflection and reading. He lives with his wife, Dorothy, in the West Adams district, not far from Holman, and says he is in good health. But he’s nearly as busy as ever.

“Jim is focused with laser-beam intensity on the issues,” said the Rev. J. Edwin Bacon Jr., rector of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena. “He’s simply still equipping people to be effective resistors to that which dehumanizes us -- be it war, economic oppression, injustice or racism. Those are the interlocking axis of evil that Martin King identified.”

For Lawson, today’s causes are but a variation on themes that engaged him in the 1950s and ‘60s.

He was working as a Methodist preacher in India, where he studied the principles of nonviolence taught by the followers of the late Mahatma Gandhi, who had led the Indian nationalist movement against British rule and had been assassinated by a countryman in 1948.

Lawson had heard of the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala. He returned to the U.S. and undertook graduate studies in theology at Oberlin College, where he heard King speak in 1957. At a small luncheon afterward, Lawson took a seat across the table from the civil rights leader. They hit it off. King was intrigued by Lawson’s understanding of Gandhian nonviolence and urged him to go to the South and join the civil rights movement.

Lawson heeded King’s call and went to Nashville, where he prepared students to break the color barrier at “white only” lunch counters at downtown department stores. Lawson schooled the students in nonviolent protest and the importance of not responding to taunts and provocations.

In workshops, participants would play the role of racists by shouting slurs as a way to teach self-restraint. Some called it a boot camp. They learned to protect themselves by gathering in groups, making it difficult for attackers to focus on a single individual.

Lawson remains “the person who connects the dots between Gandhi and King,” Bacon said.

The Nashville lunch counters became integrated. Afterward, Lawson was in and out of such hot spots as Montgomery and Birmingham, Ala. He helped students organize libraries, freedom schools and voter registration in Mississippi.

Lawson rarely speaks of his achievements. Instead, he speaks of King. Indeed, several of Lawson’s associates said they learned of Lawson’s accomplishments from others.

The Rev. Thomas Hill, 52, now superintendent of the Pasadena district of the United Methodist Church, said it wasn’t until a couple of years after serving with Lawson at Holman that he began to understand his importance in history. But he heard about it from the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who had come to Holman to preach.

Lawson practiced what he preached. Hill recalled a man cursing and spitting in Lawson’s face during a Los Angeles demonstration in the late 1980s against apartheid in South Africa. “Jim didn’t take the same tack. Jim basically appealed to the man’s, as Lincoln said, ‘better angels.’ He talked to him about freedom for all of God’s children,” Hill said. “What struck me about that moment is, I thought if I were in Jim’s shoes I would have struck the man.”

But for Lawson to have done so would have betrayed King’s heritage. His voice still teeters on an emotional precipice when he speaks of April 4, 1968, when a shot rang out in Memphis, killing King.

Lawson had invited the civil rights leader to Memphis to support striking garbage workers. He left King at the Lorraine Motel in the late afternoon after a strategy session and went home for dinner.

“Shortly after I got in the house and greeted my family, I heard something about a shot come out of the television that was in an alcove, away from the dining room and the kitchen. I went in and saw it. They had a [headline] on the bottom [of the screen] that Dr. King has been shot.

“This is maybe less than two hours after we had separated and had agreed we would meet that evening at the mass meeting.”

Just a day earlier, King had delivered a now much-quoted “Mountaintop Speech,” in which he again spoke of his dream of equality and added, “I may not get there with you.”

Did he have any regrets for inviting King to Memphis?

“None. None. Martin expected his death. I don’t know if he specifically expected it on that day, but he had known since Montgomery that he could be shot down or assassinated anytime,” Lawson said.

King sometimes received as many as 50 death threats a day, Lawson said.

Lawson said he joins many other African Americans in the belief that James Earl Ray was not King’s assassin. Lawson later performed a marriage ceremony in prison for Ray, who has since died.

Pressed, Lawson points to the December 1999 findings by a civil jury in Memphis concluding that King was not the victim of a lone gunman, but of a conspiracy. The suit was brought by King’s widow, Coretta, and children.

“The movement of the ‘50s and ‘60s never matured enough to get all the issues exposed. We really were just beginning,” Lawson said. The spark of idealism and enthusiasm is still present, especially among college students, he said. But Lawson, ever the organizer, says the problem is that their idealism is not being channeled into actions that can create change. As for leaders of a new generation?

“On my worst days, I think there are none, but I know that to be false,” he said. “There has been, I believe, a U.S.A. struggle of people toward the light, toward turning down the wrong and raising up the new thing, the new possibility, the new access, the new levels of bringing in more people into the community and embracing them as fellow citizens, embracing them as being equal to all of us.”