john lewis

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called him “the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world.” To Rep. John Lewis, he was “the architect of the nonviolence movement.” Jesse Jackson simply called him “the Teacher.” We at the Fellowship of Reconciliation are blessed to have counted him among our core team of organizers. It is with reverence that we remember his life and time with us.

Rev. James M. Lawson, Jr., who died Sunday at age 95, was born in Uniontown, Pennsylvania, and moved with his family to Massillon, Ohio, shortly after. As part of a deeply Christian family, James began regularly reading the bible and developed a prophetic and liberatory interpretation of the gospels at an early age. In a 2014 interview published by Fellowship magazine, Lawson told Diane Lefer, “By the end of my high school years, I came to recognize that that whole business – walk the second mile, turn the other cheek, pray for the enemy, see the enemy as a fellow human being – was a resistance movement. It was not an acquiescent affair or a passive affair. I saw it as a place where my own life grew in strength inwardly, and where I had actually seen people changed because I responded with the other cheek. I went the second mile with them.”