‘Emulate Black Lives Matter,’ Civil Rights Icon Says With out Having to Point out SNCC on MLK Day ’21
Rev. James Lawson speaks to Dream Summer students. UCLA photo
From Clint Confehr
NASHVILLE, TN – Follow Black Lives Matter to Advocate Civil Rights, a 92-year-old Methodist pastor said during a recently streamed program from the local interdenominational ministerial community.
This preacher certainly knows after mentoring students at historically black colleges and universities here. Several formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and separated the counters for lunch.
SNCC welcomes BLM.
Rev. James Lawson Jr. urged IMF viewers to “emulate Black Lives Matter as we move the civil rights movement … until the day we will actually see a society in which every boy and girl born into that society … will be given unrestricted access to the tree of life.
“That’s why God created mankind,” Lawson said. His message was presented by US Representative Jim Cooper for one of the five IMF programs aired on January 18 to “promote the life and legacy of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Honorable Member John Lewis ”.
Lawson “taught King pretty much everything John knew” about nonviolent protest, Cooper said on the IMF video, calling the late congressman his “dear friend.” Lawson’s roots in Tennessee stretch from Scott Chapel 55 miles south of Fisk University to Shelbyville, where he directed the community’s church building forced by urban renewal in 1961. Shelbyville is Cooper’s hometown.
Lawson’s nonviolent resistance classes began near Fisk at the Clark Memorial Methodist Church.
Lewis “loved his college days here and loved coming back and seeing the growth and progress that Nashville has,” said Cooper. “John was part of that growth. His good problems, his passionate advocacy, his risk for the better future have all helped us to listen to the better angles of our nature. “
Lawson’s workshops on non-violence are mentioned in David Halberstan’s book The Children. Lawson was “ill-treated” by Vanderbilt University, Cooper said. The King Institute at Stanford states: “In March 1960, Lawson was expelled from Vanderbilt for campaigning for the desegregation movement in Nashville.” Almost a year later, an Easter weekend get-together of the students – encouraged by King and then SCLC Executive Director Ella Baker – led to SNCC. Stanford names Lewis, Diane Nash, Marion Barry, Bernard Lafayette and James Bevel as early SNCC leaders.
In the IMF program, Lawson says Martin Luther King Day is to “celebrate my dear friend.” After pastoring Scott Chapel, Lawson worked at the Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis and asked King to march with striking plumbing workers.
Martin Luther King III. In the program, says he wants the IMF to “successfully realize my father’s dream of freedom, justice and equality for all.”
The National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis presented a “Mighty Story Time” for children. The museum educator Dory Lerner read “The Big Heart of My Uncle Martin” by Dr. Angela Farris Watkins. King’s niece wrote that he was known as “ML” in her family.
Watkins, Associate Professor of Psychology at Spelman College, King wrote: “One day he came home …[and] … fell asleep on the couch with his shoes on. “Her mother didn’t let her do that, but it seems that the” ordinary man with an extraordinary love “was very tired that day.
Also on MLK Day, the Nashville Symphony presented a choral performance of “We Are Nashville”. The program included a recitation by the Nashville Youth Poet Laureate Marie Shields of Overton High School. As she explored her black identity, she said that blackness doesn’t always look as expected and she was told that she “speaks white”.
During the IMF’s 32nd Annual MLK Day Youth Symposium, Metro Schools director Sharon Gentry admitted that students felt disenfranchised and asked them to “stay engaged … your time is coming.”
Also on January 18, James Story, Gallatin’s Citizen of the Year, was Grand Marshal of the Martin Luther King Jr. Unity Day Car Procession. First Baptist Church pastor Derrick Jackson spoke to attendees listening to car radios during an outdoor celebration.
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