- The late Reverend James Lawson Jr.

played a pivotal role in the Civil Rights Movement in Memphis and the nation as a whole.

In "Nonviolent: A Memoir of Resistance, Agitation, and Love," Reverend Lawson tells the story in his own words of his life and work, and the philosophy of nonviolence, justice, and love with the help of author and journalist, Emily Yellin, the book's co-author.

I'm Darel Snodgrass, and this is a conversation with Emily Yellin.

[gentle string music] And welcome, and thanks for coming into the studio today.

- Oh, I'm happy to be here.

- One of the things that struck me as I was reading this book is I feel like I know a relatively decent amount about the Civil Rights Movement in America.

And we don't seem to know a lot about Reverend Lawson.

He was one of those folks who was there, sort of a figure in a photograph, maybe we saw some quotes right after Dr.

King's assassination.

But he was sort of a very influential but almost a behind the scenes figure in the Civil Rights Movement.

And what the book has made clear is that he was really, very much of a major figure there.

And some of that was conscious choice of Dr.

King and Reverend Lawson.

Now, explain how that worked.

- Right.

So Reverend Lawson was pivotal to the movement in bringing the philosophy, the practice, the training of nonviolence to the Civil Rights Movement.

And Dr.

King met him in 1957 when Reverend Lawson was a graduate student at Oberlin in Ohio.

And when he heard about his background, Reverend Lawson had already been in India for three years.

He was already committed to nonviolent direct action.

He said, come south now, even though Reverend Lawson was in graduate school.

And Reverend Lawson dropped out of Oberlin, moved to Nashville and started working, and traveled all around the South.

And in many of the instances, in many of the campaigns, his role was as a strategist, and as an organizer, and as a trainer.

And he said if he kept a low profile, it was easier to do his job.

And actually in the Birmingham campaign in 1963, he and Dr.

King specifically decided he won't march, he won't get arrested so that when the rest of them march and get arrested, 'cause they planned on getting arrested, they wanted to go to jail, part of the strategy was to flood the jails and keep coming.

And Reverend Lawson could be on the outside still organizing and keeping a low profile.

So it's really, his story is so important as a piece that, as you say, maybe a lot of people don't know about.

Because a lot of times the Civil Rights Movement is described as sort of spontaneous acts of response when really they are highly strategized and planned campaigns.

So it wasn't that Rosa Parks was tired and that's why she didn't move from her seat on the bus in Montgomery.

That was a strategy and it was planned.

And in Nashville, they weren't sitting in because they wanted a hamburger.

It was a lot deeper than that.

And in fact, in Nashville, it's a great example.

Reverend Lawson was the one who recruited John Lewis, Diane Nash, Bernard Lafayette, so many other people who went on to be leaders in the movement when they were students in 1960 in Nashville at one of the four historically black colleges.

And he recruited them and trained them.

So there was a year-long effort before they ever did the first sit-in.

It involved understanding the problem, talking to the people of Nashville that were experiencing segregation and particularly black women, and then training and recruiting people to do this, and then going and testing to make sure that where they were gonna do it actually did refuse to let them sit there.

And then they did the sit-in.

So I think that's a really pivotal thing to realize about the movement.

And Reverend Lawson is a great endpoint for that because in all of the campaigns he was involved with, he was the main strategist.

And by the time he got to Memphis, he actually was the head of the strategy committee for the strike.

- And I think that's a really important point that this book makes, is that when you hear nonviolent, you think that that's a passive thing.

That is, it is just people not resisting.

It's much, much more than that.

And he talks about active nonviolence and strategic nonviolence.

And these are techniques and these are strategies.

They are not not reacting, they are reacting in a specific way that does not include violence.

- Yeah.

I think there's lots of ways he describes it.

And when you read the book you'll see.

But one of the ways I think that's easiest to maybe start with is the idea that nonviolence is not not fighting back.

- Right.

- It is fighting back, but it's not imitating the ways of your oppressor.

It's not fighting back in the same way that the people who are oppressing you, or the laws, or the places that are oppressing you.

So you have to use your creativity, your wit.

Part of that is that they were often up against the US government, and the US government has a military.

And Reverend Lawson would say, unless you have a military backing equivalent to the US government, you're not gonna win.

So it was both sort of a philosophical and spiritual practice, but it was also very practical.

And it's not also, I wanna be really clear, and I know he was very adamant about this.

It's not telling people who are oppressed not to fight back or to be passive at all.

It's saying that you have to think, and it's kind of counterintuitive.

'Cause when you get angry, he worked with the Little Rock Nine and they were being harassed every day.

And he went there in 1958 for their second semester of high school.

And they told him that their leaders had said, don't fight back.

And he actually got really angry and said, "No, no, no, no, no, you have to fight back."

If someone is abusing you the way you're being abused, if people, or a government, or a school, or a city, you have to fight back, otherwise it will hurt your spirit for the rest of your life.

It can hurt your soul.

It does something to you.

So he instructed them to look within, find your own sort of anger and the righteous feelings that you have that this is wrong, and use that along with your community to come together and find creative ways of resisting.

And that is really what nonviolence is.

And there are so many great examples of it in the book, and not just in the Civil Rights Movement.

He went on for 56 more years after 1968, and he was in Memphis for a little while, and then he moved to LA, and he worked with labor unions, he worked with undocumented students, with women, LGBTQ rights advocates.

He did so much.

And so there's great examples of that.

- We're gonna get to the Memphis section in a minute 'cause it's very, very compelling.

But I wanna back up just a little bit and talk about how he came to this philosophy in his life.

Because it started very, very early.

It literally started when he was a child.

And with incidents of racism when he was literally four and eight years old, and then went through his college, his decision to refuse to register for the Selective Service for the Korean War, and going to prison for that.

He didn't come to this all at once.

This was a growth thing for him through the early part of his life.

- He would call it a transformation.

- Yes.

- In fact, when we started working together, we started working together in 2020.

I've known Reverend Lawson since I was five, I wanna say that.

His son and I were in elementary school at Memphis State Campus School.

And my parents, David and Carol Lynn Yellin, and the Lawson's worked together in the movement.

So I came to this, it's kind of a lifetime of knowing him behind it.

But we started working together and I said, "Reverend Lawson, what do you want this book to do?"

And he said, "I want it to show how a person, a community, a city, a state, a country, the world can transform."

And as you say, it started very young.

The first line in the book is "I smacked a white kid in his face when I was four years old," because the kid had called him the N word.

And we thought that was a great way to start a book called "Nonviolent".

[both laughing] But he said, he called it the conventional, or the standard American response to any kind of aggressiveness or assault is to hit back right away.

And he had to kind of learn a different way that would be more successful.

That's how he saw it.

And his mother was pivotal in that.

His mother, he encountered, as you and I don't experience this, but as a black man or black boy growing up in America particularly, he was born in 1928.

He experienced this all the time.

And so there were a number of incidences in his childhood where he was called the N word or worse or other things, and he would hit people.

And then one day he did it, he was about eight, and he came home and he told his mother, he hadn't told her since then, but before that, sorry.

And she said, "Jimmy, what good did that do?

There has to be a better way."

And in that moment he describes in the book this sort of voice from within that told him this is gonna be what he does in his life.

And he said, obviously in that moment he didn't know that, but as he looked back, he called it his first call of God.

And as a minister, obviously that's very important.

And he said, I knew I was gonna spend my life fighting against racism and any other kind of bigotry, religious bigotry, and that I was going to find a way, and it became nonviolence, of doing it where I don't hurt someone else in the process.

He said, "If you want a just society, "you have to have a just movement.

"If you want a loving society, you have to have a loving movement."

And so the word love is in our subtitle, it's "Resistance, Agitation, and Love".

And those are sort of the elements of nonviolence.

And he saw that and the idea that love is not just a romantic love, but the idea that you love yourself first, you find a way to love yourself, and who you are, and what you are, and be who you are.

And then you extend that love within to the community.

And you love your community.

You love people around you.

And then the hard part, you even extend the love to the people who are oppressing you.

And that doesn't mean you love what they do, but he recognized that every human being is worthy of the gifts of life.

And I'm using his words here.

This is not me.

And you know, I'm an imperfect vessel, I think, as a white woman east Memphis.

But I have tried very hard to make sure that his voice is what comes through.

And so as I say these things, I'm using what he says.

And his idea was that love is stronger than violence.

The ultimate expression of violence is war.

The ultimate expression of love in the way that he and Dr.

King and others saw it and see it is the beloved community.

And that's the idea that you lift each other up.

We all have a right to have a living wage.

We all have a right to live in a society where we have healthcare.

And we have all of the things that, as Reverend Lawson would say, allow you to participate in the gift of life.

And cruelty, domination, all of those things are what violence and war are based on.

And that was what he was against.

So it's actually very simple, but quite difficult to achieve in our world today.

- Yeah.

Let's talk about Memphis.

There's so much here we can talk about.

But this is sort of the crux of the book, although there is much more.

It's a very, very compelling story, the way that it's told in this book, because we have Reverend Lawson's actual words, which you used so much- - From the time, yeah.

- From the time.

And we have also, and I think this is really, really critical, we also have examples of what was in the local newspapers here at the time and what was being written in the other media at the time.

And it is shocking and compelling the differences in perception of what was happening here.

- Yeah.

Well, as a journalist, of course, that was important to me to show the context that he was operating in and they were operating in.

And so in Memphis in 1968, that part of the book, there are four sections.

And one section is Memphis in 1968, it's six chapters, and it's the sanitation strike, which was 65 days.

1,300 men went out on strike.

And Reverend Lawson was the head of the strategy committee, the citizens who gathered around the strikers, the beloved community, really, that gathered around the strikers.

And it was black citizens that did this.

And they made sure that the strikers didn't go hungry.

They marched with them, they supported them, they gave money.

And that's how the strike survived, because they didn't know how long it was gonna go on.

And the City was intransigent, and that was led by Mayor Henry Loeb.

And so I really, Reverend Lawson and I both agreed, we need to tell that story deeply.

And one of the unique parts of this is it's a first person story.

Reverend Lawson is saying in his own words what happened.

And then we're using the newspapers to show how they're writing about the strike and about Reverend Lawson.

And I can say this as a journalist, again, but anybody can, but all of the newspapers, all of the reporters, editors were white men.

And some of my best friends are white men, but it wasn't a full view.

And so now you're getting, I mean, it's a long time coming, but you're getting one perspective of someone in the middle of it who was not a white man.

And I think that's super important, especially now as we are used to some more voices in our media and in our sort of public discourse.

But at the time, that wasn't the case.

And in fact, we found out that reporters were told, reporters who tried to quote Reverend Lawson, who as I said, was one of the leaders of the movement here, they tried to quote him in their articles and editors would take it out because they thought he was a dangerous man.

And there's a great quote from Jerry Wurf, who was the leader of the union, AFSCME, that organized the strike, and they said, "The reason that Reverend Lawson was so scary "to the white leaders of Memphis was that he was a totally moral man."

And I love that quote.

It's been used about him.

And they said he was a totally moral man, and totally moral men can't be corrupted, they can't be co-opted.

And so that was very dangerous to the establishment here and people who benefited from the fact that these men and many others in this community were not making a living wage and were being exploited for their own wealth.

And Reverend Lawson later in life called that plantation capitalism.

And I think we can make a case that that is certainly going on today with billionaires and with people working in contract jobs and not making enough and having to work three jobs just to make a living.

And Reverend Lawson was very adamant that violence was not just physical.

- Yes, yes.

- Poverty, enforced poverty was violence.

And Memphis is a terrible, but a very clear example.

The poverty rate in Memphis in 1968 is almost identical to the poverty rate in this century and in 2026, where we are now, but even throughout.

And that's a choice.

That's a choice a community makes.

It's a choice that government makes.

It's a choice our nation makes, because Memphis is one of the cities with the highest rate of people living in poverty.

And Reverend Lawson saw that as the root of the injustice.

And of course, and he also points out there is a long tradition, and that's really what this country was built on, was the idea that some people have to work for the benefit of others and don't get, as he said, to enjoy fully the gift of life.

- Yeah.

It's really a very compelling segment of the book.

And I have said this to you before that in my business, a lot of times you get a book, and you don't have a lot of time to read it.

And so I think I'll just skim through this and get the highlights.

And you can't do this with this book because it is so compelling.

Every word of it, his words, you have to sit and read.

- We designed that just for you, Darel, to not be able to skim it.

[both laughing] - And especially the segment here in Memphis is I think really a crucial part of the book.

And it is something that it is so crucial because it is words that we have not heard before.

- Right.

I think we haven't looked at the trajectory.

So there's a story about Mayor Henry Loeb, if I may.

- Sure, yes.

- And I think some people know, but I'll tell the story.

The sanitation strike, the thing that was said to precipitate it, to set it off the trigger was when two sanitation workers were killed in the back of a faulty truck.

And it was a rainy day, and there's a whole story around that.

Well, I looked into it and found articles and long story short, Mayor Henry Loeb, who was mayor in 1968, was originally the head of the Public Works Department, which by the way, the sanitation workers called the plantation.

Many of them were born on plantations, came to Memphis for a better life and ended up feeling the same way.

And in the '50s, Henry Loeb was head of the Public Works Department, and I found an article where he was buying trucks and he lowered the standards of what kind of things, the safety things that the trucks needed, and bought the cheapest trucks and said they're good enough.

And used the money that he saved to pave the sidewalks of east Memphis where his white constituents lived.

And those same trucks, the three trucks that they still had going, one of them was the truck that in 1968 killed the two men.

And when you start to see how one thing leads to another and leads to another and leads to another, you can take that all the way to today.

So that decision that he made, and he said in the paper, "It's good enough."

And then you see that these two men are killed, it triggers a strike, which then ends up bringing Dr.

King here.

And Dr.

King is assassinated.

And that becomes the defining moment for many people of the city.

And then here we are 50 some years later living with that legacy, and also a deeper legacy of enslavement.

And I wanna say this, 'cause this is another piece I think that's very pivotal to the way Reverend Lawson saw the world.

He said that America was founded on three original sins, and there are others, but of course one is the pillaging of land and stealing of land from native, from indigenous people.

The second is kidnapping Africans from Africa, bringing them here and enslaving them for 250 years, Jim Crow for another a hundred years, and the school to prison pipeline up to today.

And the third is, he said, a spirituality that allows people to justify burning women at the stake.

And if you look at our world today in this country, and certainly in this city, all three of those are in place still.

And I think that's a really important frame for this whole book for his life.

He lived 95 years, he lived from Jim Crow, through segregation, the Civil Rights Movement, Rodney King, immigrants rights, and he only died in 2024.

So people often say, "Well, what would he think about today?"

Well, it's in there because he didn't die that long ago.

- Now, you mentioned this a little bit earlier.

You have known the Lawson family your whole life.

Your parents actually worked with Reverend Lawson in the '60s and during the time of what was going on here.

How did this come about that you got to write this memoir?

How how did you approach Reverend Lawson?

How did this happen?

- Well, I had that beginning, of course.

And then in the '90s I wrote for the New York Times, and covered the South.

And Reverend Lawson was involved in some stories that I reported on.

So I actually interviewed him as the New York Times.

And there I was, he had been a parent of one of my first grade classmates, and I'm interviewing him, a friend of my parents.

And then I was in LA also during the Rodney King uprising.

I lived in LA, and I'd heard him on the radio speaking.

So he's been a voice in my life.

And then when I, in 2018, I produced a 10-part series for The Root called 1300 Men, about the sanitation workers.

I interviewed surviving sanitation workers, their wives and their children about their lives.

And the only other person I interviewed was Reverend Lawson.

And we really connected then obviously.

And in 2020, I was just talking to him on the phone.

He was in LA, I was in Memphis, it was during the pandemic.

And I said, "Have you ever thought about writing a memoir?"

And he said, "My family has wanted me to do that forever."

And I said, "Well, I would love to help you with that if you want to."

And six weeks later he called me back and said, yes.

And his son told me, yeah, he came to the family and we all said yes, but the pivotal yes was his wife, his partner, his love, Mrs.

Dorothy Lawson.

And she said, yes.

And then we set off and we spent... I talked to him at least once a week for almost two, two and a half years.

And then his papers are at Vanderbilt.

And I was able to go there and go through that.

And we found journals.

The whole chapter about his time in prison- - It's his journals.

- Is his journal from when he was 21.

So it's his words.

And as much as possible, I tried to use his words.

And then he narrated around that with me.

We looked at it and explained and filled in.

And so that happened throughout the book.

That's why we used so many newspaper articles where he was quoted and where people were talking about him.

And editorials written negative ones in the Memphis Press Simitar and the Memphis Commercial Appeal about him.

The newspapers in Memphis and Nashville in particular were characters in the book, and they were against the movement- - Oh, yeah.

- And against Reverend Lawson in particular 'cause he was considered particularly radical, especially here in Memphis.

- The book's been out for a couple of weeks now.

Last time we talked, it was right before it came out.

And you have been doing book tours, and doing lots of interviews, and talking to lots of people.

What's been the reaction?

How have people taken this?

- I mean, everybody I think is hungry for this kind of clarity and moral clarity that Reverend Lawson and his life provide.

His son and I, as I said, have gone around the country talking about this, and people are really interested in the movement, and they're interested in his story, and his life, but they really wanna know, what does this do for us now?

How can this help us?

Because people are struggling now in this world that we're in right now, where so many things, it's so hard to tell what's true, for instance.

And Reverend Lawson, that idea that he's a totally moral man, and moral doesn't mean that he's stuffy or telling people what to do.

It's more a sense that this is how you treat other human beings.

I'll tell you what I learned from him.

And this is something that has resonated on the tour as we've talked to people.

One day I was talking to a friend who was having problems with someone they loved.

And I found myself saying, "Well, I've been working with Reverend Lawson "all the couple of years, "and what I would think he might say is, What would love do?"

He would ask that question in difficult situations.

And sometimes it's hard to be loving in a difficult situation, but if you can boil it down to something like that, that's the kinds of thing, that's the of thing that people have taken from this book and really enjoyed the idea that there is something that can tell you, here's how you treat another human being.

And you don't hurt people, you lift other people up.

And we are all in community and we're all in this together.

- The book is "Nonviolent: A Memoir of Resistance, Agitation, and Love" by the Reverend James Lawson.

Co-written by my guest today, Emily Yellin.

I just read a Kirkus review that said this book belongs in every library.

And I think that's true.

Emily Yellin, thanks so much for coming in.

- Oh, thank you, Darel, always.

[gentle strings music] [acoustic guitar chords]