FILE – In this September 17, 2015 file photo, Rev. James Lawson speaks in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Lawson, who led workshops on nonviolence during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, said he was encouraged by efforts to achieve equality in the elections amid what he sees as attempts to thwart it. (AP Photo / Mark Humphrey, File)
From TRAVIS LOLLER
Associated Press
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) _ On April 20, 1960, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. stood on a podium at Fisk University and said he had come to Nashville “not to be inspired, but to be inspired by the great movement that took place in this community. “
Hundreds of students from Fisk and other historically black colleges sat at all-white lunch counters downtown for weeks. Many were jailed and their attorney’s home was bombed on April 19, leading to King’s visit.
But the students had also just pressured the mayor to publicly admit on the town hall steps that the separation was morally wrong. And within a few weeks the lunch counters would be open to everyone.
It was a huge victory for the students in Nashville, the first major city in the south to give up their downtown accommodations. For those attending nonviolent workshops led by Rev. James Lawson, however, this was only the first step. They played a major role in almost all major civil rights-era campaigns.
Recently, The Associated Press hosted a video call where Lawson and three of his workshop attendees discussed their civil rights work and how it reverberates in today’s justice movements like Black Lives Matter and Voting Rights in Georgia.
Angeline Butler was only 15 when she started college in Fisk and soon found herself involved in an RPG with students playing the role of the white mobs. She recalled her first sit-ins when she said, “When they asked us to go, we actually went.”
“They’re building an army,” she explained. “We went back to the church meeting and discussed how we would react to being yelled at, being called, and throwing objects.”
“It was like a boot camp,” added Bernard LaFayette, who lived with John Lewis at the American Baptist Theological Seminary (now American Baptist College).
Their principles of nonviolence were put to the test when they refused to leave the lunch counters. During a march: “This guy spat on Jim Lawson. And what did Jim Lawson do? He asked for a handkerchief, ”LaFayette recalled.
Butler added, “Well, he took off his glasses and had to wipe them clean, and he didn’t have a handkerchief. So he asked the guy to give him a handkerchief and the guy felt so guilty that he did it! “
The man was wearing a motorcycle jacket, LaFayette said, and Lawson asked him about motorcycles, and soon the man went with him. Realizing where he was, he ran away, but they never saw him again in a counter protest.
Lawson had studied nonviolence in India and was a divinity student at Oberlin College in 1957 when he met King, who urged him to come south and join the fight that Lawson described as “a sacred moment.”
Lawson said the sit-ins were one of several tactics to desegregate downtown. Students also worked on taking down signs signaling that some accommodations were for whites while others, usually inferior, were for blacks. And they put pressure on companies to hire blacks for jobs that were reserved for whites.
As the sit-ins spread, Nashville students helped organize them by forming the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. “Between 1960 and 1965, over 200 cities in the southeast separated their inner cities,” Lawson said.
Lawson’s students also led the Freedom Rides and Freedom Summer in Mississippi and, along with King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, organized the voting and desegregation campaigns in Alabama and Mississippi.
Jim Zwerg, one of the few white students at Fisk, remembered how Lawson linked the movement to his Christian faith. While reading the Bible one night, Zwerg realized, “The Gospels were the most wonderful, beautiful, and powerful story of nonviolent direct action ever written. And at that moment I said, “I have to do more.”
Dwarf helped integrate Nashville’s theaters, joined the Freedom Rides, and refused to fight back when he was attacked by a mob in Montgomery, Alabama. Dazed and bloody in a hospital bed, Zwerg told a television interviewer that the trips were continuing to build support.
“What we did in the 20th century was the first great awakening of opposition to the racist systems,” Lawson said. “And I claim that Black Lives Matter is the heir to this campaign.”
Some are trying to brand Black Lives Matter as violent “just like they called our 1960s movement” communist “and” socialist “and” un-American “,” Lawson noted.
Dwarf said the Black Lives Matter movement gave him hope, as did the young people working to end the gun violence after surviving the school shootings.
“Georgia just gave me a lot of hope,” Butler added, citing the electoral election of black and Jewish senators as the culmination of years of organization.
“In terms of combat, they did some of the best follow-up of the 21st century,” agreed Lawson. “That’s the kind of organization that comes out of a nonviolent movement.”
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