James Lawson: The Workshops Nobody Showed

James Lawson arrived in Nashville in nineteen fifty-eight with a particular assignment he had given himself. He had spent three years in India studying with people who had worked alongside Gandhi. He had met Martin Luther King, Jr., who had urged him to come south as quickly as possible and bring what he knew. He enrolled at Vanderbilt Divinity School and immediately began holding workshops.

The workshops took place at American Baptist Theological Seminary on the west side of Nashville, and at First Baptist Capitol Hill Church. The students who came were serious young people from the city's Black colleges who wanted to do something about segregation but did not know how. Lawson gave them a curriculum that was as much philosophy as tactics. He taught what nonviolent direct action actually meant: not passivity, not turning the other cheek in the sense of accepting abuse and doing nothing, but a disciplined, strategic, and morally costly engagement that placed the burden of violence entirely on the other side.

He taught them how to keep their composure when someone struck them. He taught them to make eye contact and not to dehumanize their antagonists. He taught them what to expect from arrest and how to conduct themselves in jail. He ran role-playing exercises in which students practiced receiving the kind of treatment they would face at lunch counters.

By the spring of nineteen sixty, his students, John Lewis, Diane Nash, James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, and others, had become the most systematically trained nonviolent activists in the entire civil rights movement. They were the ones who sat down at Woolworth's. They were the ones who went south on the Freedom Rides. They were the ones who helped build the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

When Vanderbilt learned that Lawson was organizing civil rights demonstrations, it expelled him. Eleven Vanderbilt faculty members resigned in protest. Lawson finished his divinity degree at Boston University and continued his work. The workshops nobody showed are why the movement looked the way it did.