James Lawson

Reverend James M. Lawson Jr. was the principal teacher of nonviolent direct action to the Southern civil rights movement. After spending 13 months in federal prison in 1951–52 as a draft refuser during the Korean War (he refused conscientious-objector status on the grounds that registration itself was cooperation with militarism), he traveled to India to study Gandhian satyagraha. From Nashville he led the workshops that produced the Nashville sit-in movement of 1959–60 and trained the activists who would become the core of SNCC, including Diane Nash, John Lewis, and James Bevel. He was repeatedly jailed for civil rights organizing across the South and was the principal architect of the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers' strike.