Excerpt
Nonviolent
One Jimmy, There Must Be a Better WayI smacked a white boy in his face when I was four years old. He lived a few houses down from me on Tremont Street in Massillon, Ohio. It was 1933. We were the same age, and I thought we were friends. Seconds before, the two of us had been having our usual kind of fun in the overgrown vacant lot on our block—throwing around stones we found in the dirt and shooting them from slingshots into the air. All of a sudden, he started calling me names, hurling racist words at me, words that were forbidden in my house, like “n——r.” But it wasn’t only that word. It was the harshness. He was rejecting me, and somewhere within my little-boy self I realized he was seeing me as not fully human, all because I was Black.
For the first time, racism had come at me directly. I was shocked. I felt betrayed. I thought, “Why would you say those things about me and call me those names? We’re playmates.” Before then, it had never occurred to me that a boy who was part of our neighborhood group of friends—we had run freely together countless times, along the shores of the shallow creek behind our houses, exploring, catching minnows, or just wading in—would harbor such hatred toward me. I wasn’t angry, exactly. His turn on me happened so quickly, and I knew he was wrong. But he broke our bond. He was wielding an ugly, hostile force and hammering my life with it. He was hurting my spirit. I wanted him to stop.
So I balled up my fist, reached back as far as I could, swung my arm around with determination, and hit him in his jaw. Hard. Or as hard as a four-year-old could. He was startled. So was I. Then he hit me back. The whole thing could not have lasted more than a minute. Neither of us left with noticeable bruises or cuts. In the end, I suppose I won our tough-kid scuffle. I was a better fighter than he was. And he was the first one to back off. I believed I had taught him a lesson. And no one in our group of playmates ever called me those names again, including him. My punching worked. Or so I thought.
The memory of that moment has never left me. Although most of the boy’s physical characteristics have faded away, and his name escaped me long ago, my mind held on to our clash, turning it over, hoping to divine some message I suspected it contained. Decades passed, and I grew more skilled at recognizing signs and heeding signals, until I realized why punching him had left such a lasting imprint on me. It was my first call of God.
As that boy began his tirade, I felt a force rising up from deep inside, stronger than the mean message in his words. It was an inkling, or an impulse, a spur, urging me to challenge the hate he was spewing. I couldn’t resist it. If I could go back to my four-year-old self and explain that mysterious, astonishing, empowering force I sensed within me that day, I would tell my younger self that it was God’s love. And I would assure him that it would always be there for him from that day forward— reminding him that no one has the right to deny, question, or assault the fact of his humanity, his character, his essence.
I use the word “reminding” because by the time I was four, my parents had already instilled that message in me. They cared about me, directed me, and provided for me. I was their oldest son, with five older sisters and three younger brothers. And even at that early age, I already knew I was Jimmy Lawson. I was a child of God. I was loved. I belonged. And I mattered.
It took me a while to understand how rare it was for a Black child growing up in such a racist nation to get the chance to internalize that kind of message. I see now how my family and my faith gave me that foundation and it became my armor and my refuge. It also cultivated a lifelong fortitude that would serve me well in the face of all the bullies and hatred I would encounter. And it tempered me with the love, compassion, and moral clarity I would need to help others do the same.
God’s first call to me sparked another certainty that grew within me as I got older. I had a purpose. I now believe God gave me a task that day: to resist racism, to continually unmask it, along with any other efforts to diminish human beings. It was the beginning of a spiritual journey in which I would always—with every ounce of energy and life I had in me— challenge racist definitions of myself and of other people. Forever after that day in 1933, I would never accept such behavior from anyone, and I would spend my whole life helping others refuse that kind of degrading and devaluing treatment too.
That journey has taken me all over the world: to India and through Africa in the mid-1950s, and to the American South in the late 1950s and the 1960s, where I worked with my friend and colleague Martin Luther King Jr. We campaigned to desegregate Southern cities, including Little Rock and Birmingham, and strived to spread economic equity and racial justice throughout the South and the nation. Others who shared my convictions, our convictions, have called me a mentor, like John Lewis and Diane Nash. They turned into my lifelong friends after 1960, when we organized our first lunch counter sit-ins together and desegregated downtown Nashville. In 1961, I was arrested at a bus station in Jackson, Mississippi, on the Freedom Ride and was sent to Parchman Prison. I traveled to Vietnam in 1965, in the middle of the war, on a peace mission. And when James Meredith was shot on a highway in Mississippi in 1966, the church where I pastored in nearby Memphis became the staging area for the March Against Fear, during which Stokely Carmichael (who later became Kwame Ture) made the term “Black Power” famous.
In 1968, I headed up the strategy committee when thirteen hundred Black sanitation workers went on strike against the city of Memphis. They were the men who marched almost every day of the sixty-five-day strike with the iconic signs declaring, “i am a man.” They were the people Martin was in town supporting when he was assassinated. Grief at losing him has never left me. But his memory became a constant inspiration for me to carry on my conviction to my task, our task.
It followed me when my wife and children and I moved to Los Angeles in the mid-1970s, where I was assigned to be the pastor at one of the largest Methodist churches in the city. Ever since, I have advocated in California and beyond for workers’ rights and the rights of immigrants, women, LGBTQ people, and many others on the margins of full citizenship in this country. In 1992, in the midst of the uprisings in L.A. after the not-guilty verdict for the police officers videotaped beating Rodney King, I rallied against police brutality—an issue I had begun addressing decades before. And I continued to live out my convictions into the twentyfirst century, and into my nineties, including as a teacher and mentor to those in the immigrant student movement and as a voice in the Movement for Black Lives.
Mine has been a rich life. I have carried out God’s original task for me faithfully, despite my flaws and missteps along the way. There is still so much more to do. But when I look back to that four-year-old’s punch in the vacant lot in Massillon, Ohio, I also see seeds of another vital quest in my life, one related and equal to the task God gave me that day. This one has been more complicated and nuanced, and in many ways even harder to fulfill, than my unwavering conviction to stand up to racism and dehumanization wherever it appears. It is my quest for the most effective way to assert that conviction, to carry out my task. That search led me to embrace nonviolence.
In all the campaigns for human rights I have joined since the 1950s, I have conducted workshops on nonviolent direct action for thousands of people. For more than twenty years, I taught classes on nonviolent social change at UCLA and California State University, Northridge. I also conducted an ongoing nonviolence workshop once a month for most of my time in Los Angeles, just as I first did weekly in Nashville in the late 1950s. Through everything, I have helped many people affirm a proven truth, one I hold to be self-evident: commitment to violence ultimately destroys people, but commitment to nonviolence ultimately creates, sustains, and secures inalienable rights like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for us all. Violence serves tyrants. Nonviolence serves justice, the common good—the forming of a more perfect union.
Still, nonviolence is mostly misunderstood, misinterpreted, ridiculed, and shunned. Most Americans believe that nonviolence merely involves being passive and is therefore weak—not doing anything in the face of threats. In fact, nonviolence is an active, durable, and infinitely powerful practice. It is an art and a science, and more effective and sustainable than violence has ever been or ever will be.
