Soul Force

In his last and greatest sermon, on April 3, 1968, at Mason Temple in Memphis, Martin Luther King Jr. applauded his fellow minister, James Lawson. “He’s been to jail for struggling,” said King. “He’s been kicked out of Vanderbilt University for this struggle. But he’s still going on, fighting for the rights of his people.” In Nonviolent: A Memoir of Resistance, Agitation, and Love, Lawson recounts a life fighting for civil rights. Along the way, he shaped many of the movement’s key struggles, from Little Rock to Nashville to Birmingham to Memphis.

Before he died in 2024, Lawson collaborated on the book with Emily Yellin, a longtime contributor to The New York Times and other national publications. Yellin is also the author of books including Our Mothers’ War: American Women at Home and on the Front During World War II and the producer of Striking Voices, a 10-part video series about the 1968 Sanitation Workers’ Strike in Memphis.

Yellin answered questions via email from Chapter 16:

Chapter 16: You called Rev. Lawson one day in 2020 and asked about working together on his memoir. How did you know him, and why did you want to tell his story?

Emily Yellin: I have known Rev. Lawson since I was five years old, when his oldest son John and I were in elementary school together. My parents and he and Mrs. Lawson became friends while working together in the movement in Memphis. At various times in my life since, our paths have crossed. I remember hearing him on the radio when I was an adult living in Los Angeles in 1992, during the uprising after the officers who beat Rodney King were acquitted. He compared it to being in Memphis after Martin Luther King was killed. I hadn’t heard his voice in years. Then, in the mid-1990s, I was a reporter covering the South for The New York Times when he and the King family were pushing to get James Earl Ray a new trial in Memphis. I interviewed and wrote about him then. And in 2018, I interviewed him for the video series I produced about the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers and their families.

When the pandemic came, I thought working with him on his memoir was something we could do, even though we were stuck at home for a year. His family had wanted him to do it for decades. And our family connection meant we had a trust that served us well. He said our working together was providential. I said it was a secular parable about being nice to your friends’ kids and your kid’s friends, because you never know which one might help you write your memoir one day.

Chapter 16: Can you describe the course of your collaboration? What did you learn about him during this process?

Yellin: We started talking on the phone a few times a week. I recorded the calls as we went through his life. Then I went out to Los Angeles a few times in the next few years to talk to him in person. I also spent a lot of time at the Vanderbilt University library going through his papers and photos and finding wonderful material that helped us bring even more dimension to his surprisingly sharp and detailed memories.

One of the many incredible things I saw about him in the process was the uncanny consistency of his message throughout his life. I found journal entries from the 1950s that echoed what he was still saying in the 2020s. And his commitment to nonviolent revolution as the way to end racial and economic injustice was as strong then as it was 70 years later.

Chapter 16: As indicated by the title, the ethic of nonviolence defined Lawson’s approach to politics and society. What did nonviolence mean to him? How did he come to adopt this philosophy?

Yellin: Rev. Lawson said from the start that he hoped his story would show how a person, a place, a nation, and the world can transform. His vision for the kind of world we want included caring for our fellow beings and the Earth and collaborating for change without dominating and exploiting each other. Of course, there is much more to it than that. But the word nonviolence comes from the Sanskrit word ahimsa, which means respect each other and do no harm. He found nonviolence first through his mother’s wisdom and then through studying the teachings of Jesus and Gandhi. It evolved during his time in federal prison for resisting the Korean War draft, his time in India and Africa in the mid-1950s, and his early work in the South with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a group committed to nonviolent social change.

Chapter 16: How would you describe Lawson’s role in the Civil Rights Movement over the course of the 1960s? He was somehow both a significant, controversial public figure and a quiet, behind-the-scenes force.

Yellin: Dr. King said Rev. Lawson was the leading strategist and teacher of nonviolent direct action in the world. And John Lewis called him the architect of the nonviolent movement in America. The behind-the-scenes part was by design. He and Dr. King agreed that he would be the one to operate under the radar in many of the campaigns he helped lead. That way, in Birmingham for instance, when everyone else was in jail, he could still strategize and organize on the outside to move the cause forward. In Nashville, he recruited and trained college students like John Lewis, Bernard Lafayette, and Diane Nash to join in a campaign to end segregation in the city. But he was very adamant that the students, not him, would be the ones out front at press conferences and during demonstrations. He was controversial because when he did speak out, it was always to push people with power not to abuse it. He saw violence as an abuse of power.

Chapter 16: You devote one of the four major sections in Nonviolent to Memphis in 1968, a period defined by the sanitation strike and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. When witnessed through the eyes of Lawson, how did this turbulent moment look?

Yellin: That one year was so pivotal in the history of this nation, and Rev. Lawson was at the center of the earth-shattering events surrounding Dr. King’s assassination. He was more visible in that campaign than ever before. Just about everything ever written about 1968 in Memphis has been written by white, male historians. Much of it is very good. But we saw the need to dig deep into his account, partly because it would be the first major work written in first person by a Black person directly involved in that moment. It felt vital to get his perspective into the historical record. Also, it was such an amazing story of nonviolent resistance overcoming what Rev. Lawson came to call “plantation capitalism.”

As a side note: My parents spearheaded a multimedia oral history of the strike and its aftermath, starting in April 1968. They were both journalists and saw that the local media was covering only one side of the story. Never, in the 65 days of the strike, did the two daily papers interview sanitation strikers about their lives. The papers also refused to cover the efforts of the community supporting the strikers. In fact, reporters stopped quoting Rev. Lawson because they knew their editors would cut him out of their stories. As part of that oral history project, now held at the University of Memphis library, my father interviewed Rev. Lawson 11 times from 1968 to 1972. So, there are sentences in the book that were partly constructed from his answers to my dad then, and to me 50 years later.

Chapter 16: Lawson writes of Donald Trump: “He has an emptiness — a vast hole in his soul.” How did Lawson interpret the politics of our time? How was that interpretation shaped by his longer experiences?

Yellin: He also said that publicly about Tennessee’s governor, Bill Lee, when Lee enacted some of Trump’s healthcare and economic policies that hurt vulnerable people in the state. Rev. Lawson said the health of a nation, a state, or a city should be measured by things like its infant mortality rate, its rate of people living in poverty, and the ability of all its citizens to make a living wage.

The book shows how throughout his 95 years, Rev. Lawson saw people and policies transform a few times. It happened most famously during the nonviolent direct-action campaigns of the 1960s, but also in Los Angeles, where he helped foster a more diverse labor movement, condemned police brutality, and stood up for women’s, LGBTQ+, and immigrants’ rights. He also taught undocumented college students at UCLA and Cal State for the last 20 years of his life.

His courses and wider teachings on nonviolent social change left a powerful legacy. They continue to prepare and inspire current generations facing yet another wave of what he would likely call the tyranny of plantation capitalism.