James Morris Lawson Jr. is an American activist and university professor. He was a leading theoretician and tactician of nonviolence within the Civil Rights Movement. During the 1960s, he served as a mentor to the Nashville Student Movement and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He was expelled from Vanderbilt University for his civil rights activism in 1960, and later served as a pastor in Los Angeles for 25 years.
James Lawson speaking at a community meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, in 2005
Lawson in 2010 talking with an audience member following a panel discussion on the Nashville sit-ins
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was the principal channel of student commitment in the United States to the civil rights movement during the 1960s. Emerging in 1960 from the student-led sit-ins at segregated lunch counters in Greensboro, North Carolina, and Nashville, Tennessee, the Committee sought to coordinate and assist direct-action challenges to the civic segregation and political exclusion of African Americans. From 1962, with the support of the Voter Education Project, SNCC committed to the registration and mobilization of black voters in the Deep South. Affiliates such as the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization in Alabama also worked to increase the pressure on federal and state government to enforce constitutional protections.
John Lewis representing SNCC at the Civil Rights March on Washington in 1963
Fannie Lou Hamer (1964) speaks at a Democratic Convention regarding the plight of sharecroppers. She founded the Freedom Farm Cooperative, an independent food project to provide aid for sharecroppers.
Anne Moody in the 1970s
John Lewis representing SNCC at the Civil Rights March on Washington in 1963