James Lawson, a Methodist minister, deeply committed to social change through love and nonviolence, was assigned to Nashville by Martin Luther King in 1958 to train college students in nonviolence. In February of 1960, black college students led full-scale sit-ins in Nashville that led to the desegregation of Nashville.
In a relatively short period of time, primarily the fall of 1959, Lawson turned frustrated and cowed black college students into disciplined and committed warrior/activists willing to risk it all for the sake of justice for the oppressed. This remarkable but largely unknown story is told in great detail by David Halberstam in his The Children. "Children" was the term black adults affectionately used to describe these young and courageous activists.
From shame and humiliation caused by the treatment from white oppressors to love, courage to act, to commitment to live and create "the beloved community" (the kingdom of God). They put the kingdom first, justice first, releasing the oppressed first. A spiritual/social miracle in a short period of time, truly astounding.
How did this miracle happen? Humanly speaking, James Lawson is the key; he was a mentor who fully believed what he was teaching. Through God, Lawson moved the Nashville Eight from anger and hatred of their enemies---white segregationists---to not only love for these enemies, but aggressive but nonviolent action to end segregation. After Nashville was desegregated, the next God-ordered assignment was to complete the Freedom Rides. The civil rights infantry who began the Rides had been beaten into submission. Watching from Nashville, the Nashville Eight, now elite special forces, volunteered to complete the Freedom Rides at high risk into Alabama and Mississippi.
Now some excerpts from The Children in which Halberstam provides insights into this spiritual/social miracle, a miracle that wasn't coming out of traditional churches, college and seminaries.
Lawson "spoke again and again of the awesome power of action which was just [and motivated by love] in a land where the laws were unjust. . . Ordinary people who acted on conscience and took terrible risks were no longer ordinary people. They were by their very actions transformed."
"From the start Diane Nash liked the workshops. They were filled with purpose. There she met people her own age who had had comparable painful experiences. They formed an unusual community for the time: . . . they were not only making friendships but moving toward historic confrontations with the bastions of segregated. . . . they took sustenance from each other."
Reverend Lawson had the reputation of being brilliant and passionate, but that Lawson didn't come to the workshops. Instead, "He seemed to lack passion, and when he spoke he was cool and detached. . . . His meetings, despite the explosive nature of the subject matter, were always low-key. . . . They had come to him with their anger and their willingness to act upon it, but again and again he would talk about the power of love."
Lawson wanted a commitment deeper than emotions; the commitment had to be based on great ideas, on Truth, or it wouldn't endure when the going got tough. Lawson "had to convince them that this cause was real and they could pull it off, young and uncertain though they were individually. He could also sense---indeed, virtually smell---the overwhelmingly doubt which so obviously existed in their minds."
Halberstam adds:
"Not only were these young people drawn together for a larger social-political cause which demanded that they take action themselves and do things which their parents [and churches] had not done and probably would not sanction them doing, but they were also, in the process, unburdening themselves of their inner thoughts and pain on the subject of race. . . . To talk about their treatment as inferior citizens seemed to confirm that they WERE inferior citizens and that the fault was theirs. . . . the first great lesson of these workshops. They had all felt the same pain and they all felt the same frustration. . . . all of them had bottled up that pain for a long time.. . . . They were not merely rejecting the white world as it existed, they were rejecting that part of the black community which accepted the status quo."
In chapter six, Halberstam comments:
"In the process Lawson had to destroy the cruel power of the magic word---nigger---used by whites both to undermine them and to create a terrible sense of shame, as well as an instinct to lash back. . . . They had to start by forgiving their enemies. Just a Jesus and Gandhi would have done. In his teaching he emphasized the life of Jesus."
Some final words on the nasty word nigger:
"Nigger in those days in Nashville was almost a generic word. . . nigger killing, nigger preacher, nigger car, nigger music. . . . When it was all over, they decided that the greatest victory of Jim Lawson's had been to turn what had been a source of shame and weakness into a source of strength."
Lawson: "What they were doing was not an act of courage, it was an act of faith, faith in each other and faith in God."
When the Nashville 8 decided to complete the Freedom Rides, no one, not their parents, not even the pastors who supported them in their efforts to desegregate Nashville, would support their efforts to complete the Freedom Rides because death was almost inevitable. So the elite special forces went totally on their own with a generous assist from God Almighty.
They demonstrated, in the words of Graham Cray, that the agenda of the kingdom of God is justice, that the dynamic of the kingdom of God is the Holy Spirit.
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