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martin luther king jr
In Remembrance of James Lawson, a Force for Good and Champion of Peace
We at the Fellowship of Reconciliation, where he worked for many years, are blessed to have counted the civil rights leader among our core team of organizers. It is with reverence that we remember his life and time with us.
Jun 16, 2024
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.”
While attending Baldwin-Wallace College, Lawson met A.J. Muste, the Fellowship of Reconciliation’s executive secretary, a renowned pacifist and nonviolent direct action strategist. Deeply inspired, Lawson immediately joined the FOR. Graduating college in 1950, as the Cold War grew, Lawson determined that he would refuse the military draft. Instead of Korea, he was sent to prison, where he served 13 months.
In 1953, Lawson accepted an offer from Hislop College in Nagpur, India, to teach and coach athletics, giving him the opportunity to, like FOR members Howard Thurman and Bayard Rustin had done before him, explore the connections between the Indian self-determination movement and the African-American freedom struggle. Lawson spent the next three years on the subcontinent studying Gandhi’s life and the Satyagraha movement. “I combined the methodological analysis of Gandhi with the teachings of Jesus, who concludes that there are no human beings that you can exclude from the grace of God,” Lawson described to Lefer.
Lawson was completing a graduate degree at the Oberlin School of Theology when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., while visiting the campus, recruited him. King insisted to Lawson that his expertise was needed, not eventually, but immediately! “I mentioned to [King] that while in college I had long wanted to work in the South – especially because of segregation – as a place of work, and that I wanted to do that still,” Lawson told Fellowship magazine editor Richard Deats in 1999. “His response was: ‘Come now! Don’t wait! Don’t put it off too long. We need you NOW!”
When Lawson told A.J. Muste of his decision to move South, Muste quickly offered him a position as FOR’s Southern Field Secretary. Basing himself initially in Nashville, Lawson began working throughout the South, initially with FOR and then the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). He focused especially on recruiting and training a generation of nonviolent direct-action activists. Those young people then launched the sit-ins and Freedom Rides and founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
In 1965, while representing SCLC on an International FOR delegation to Vietnam, Lawson met Thich Nhat Hanh. This encounter significantly affected Lawson, inspiring him to facilitate a meeting between the Buddhist monk and Dr. King, and ultimately led to King’s dramatic public stance against the U.S. war in Vietnam. Lawson’s profound assessment of U.S. militarism and what he called “plantation capitalism” shaped not only the interweaving of the 1960s civil rights and anti-war struggles but ultimately how our intersectional social movements are shaped today.
In 1974, in Los Angeles, Lawson continued his solidarity with impoverished low-wage workers. He founded Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice to enlist faith communities in this struggle and pushed direct action campaigns for which he was arrested “more [times] than [during] all his work in the South.”
Lawson spent his last decades both working within peace circles while offering critiques that their movements devoted too much of their focus outside U.S. borders. He believed that true change could only come from within. “Only by engaging in domestic issues and molding a domestic coalition for justice can we confront the militarization of our land,” he argued to Lefer in 2014. “We must confront that here – not over there.”
Whether prophetically interpreting the scriptures, challenging America’s original sin with the fierce power of nonviolent direct action, or strategically connecting with other monumental peace leaders, Lawson’s commitment to social justice was relentless and unwavering. We at the Fellowship of Reconciliation are blessed to have worked with and been mentored by him. As we continue to confront the injustices of our times, we know that Lawson’s spirit is walking beside us.
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Gaza and the Language of the Unheard
As long as Israel postpones justice, it stands in the position of having these occurrences like October 7 over and over again.
Mar 17, 2024
In 1992, I spent several days in a jail in the city of Tiberias, in Israel. I was one of about 80 activists from various places on the globe who had been arrested when our “Walk for a Peaceful Future in the Middle East,” intended to go from Haifa to Jerusalem, was interrupted when we crossed the “green line” into the occupied West Bank.
Taken to various jails around Israel, I ended up in Tiberias with some 30 others from our group. Those of us from the peace walk, we discovered, were the only adults in that jail. The other prisoners were all children, boys that appeared to be as young as 12 years old.
I don’t know how many Palestinians were held in administrative detention in 1992, or how many of these were children, then. It is reported that just before Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7, the number of Palestinians held in Israeli prisons without charges, without trials, was more than 1,300, the highest number in three decades. The number has since increased dramatically to more than 7,000.
I hope that the children I shared a jail with for a few days in 1992 have found peaceful and constructive means to express their outrage, but I cannot blame them if they have not.
Children in Israeli jails are often denied parental visits, and there are reports of widespread abuse.
These past months I have been thinking about those kids often, about their parents, wondering what they are doing now. Are some still in jail? Are some of them dead? For those alive and at large, how has that trauma they suffered three decades ago and the traumas suffered since altered the course of their lives? Have some taken up arms?
When in 1967, speaking of the riots in American cities that summer in his “The Other America” speech, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “In the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard,” he was not justifying violence. He was explaining its inevitability. “And so,” he said, “in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.”
As long as Israel postpones justice, it stands in the position of having these occurrences like October 7 over and over again.
In 1967, Dr. King, like the prophet Hosea warned Israel centuries before, was telling America that if we sow wind, we will reap the whirlwind.
I hope that the children I shared a jail with for a few days in 1992 have found peaceful and constructive means to express their outrage, but I cannot blame them if they have not.
The call to free the hostages that Hamas took on October 7 should be taken seriously. The trauma that they are suffering, and the fear experienced cannot be minimized or dismissed. Nor can the suffering of thousands of Palestinian detainees, hostages themselves along with their families, be so dismissed.
In the logic of the cycle of violence that Gandhi defined, if Hamas’ violence on October 7 justifies the horrific razing of Gaza, the deaths of thousands, the starvation of a whole population by the Israeli military, then it follows that Israel’s generations of violence should justify the violence perpetrated by Hamas.
Who is worse? It would seem, by raw mathematics, that Israel is the primary aggressor, but human suffering can never be so quantified.
In his 1960 sci-fi novel, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr. speaks of a future time, much like ours, when multiple conflicts threaten to escalate into a nuclear conflagration that will leave the world devoid of life. He considers the question:
“What’s to be believed? Or does it matter at all? When mass murder’s been answered with mass murder, rape with rape, hate with hate, there’s no longer much meaning in asking whose ax is bloodier. Evil, on evil, piled on evil.”
In his 1962 essay “Christian Action in World Crisis,” the Trappist monk Thomas Merton warned of the Cold War between the United States and Russia: “We oversimplify. We seek the cause of evil and find it here or there in a particular nation, class, race, ideology, system. And we discharge upon this scapegoat all the virulent force of our hatred, compounded with fear and anguish, striving to rid ourselves of our fear by destroying the object we have arbitrarily singled out as the embodiment of all evil. Far from curing us this is only another paroxysm which aggravates our sickness.”
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The Poor People's Campaign Sets Out to Conquer Poverty and Militarism
Just a portion of what taxpayers in each state send to the Pentagon and its weapons companies could end poverty in their states.
Mar 07, 2024
We're going in the wrong direction.
The front page of the February 22 New York Times reported, "Poverty Soars in New York City, With Children Bearing the Brunt." It goes on to say that just between 2021 and 2022, the national poverty rate jumped from 7.8% to 12.4%.
The next week the Times reported, "As Millions Lose Their Medicaid, Medical Clinics for the Poor Struggle to Survive" (NYT, 2/26/24).
And yet, while poverty was increasing and healthcare for millions of poor people was threatened, the stock market over those same weeks reached its highest level in the history of the United States.
Since when is sending $16 billion on weapons to Israel for its war against Gaza more important than addressing poverty and housing and healthcare for those struggling to survive here?
Poverty is the fourth leading cause of death in the country.
These are the people who were killed by Covid-19 in much higher numbers than the rest of the population.
Many of these are the people whose work during the pandemic kept the lights on so the rest of us could shelter in place. Don't they at least deserve a true living wage?
And yet, poverty and inequality are not even a part of the debate in the upcoming national elections.
On March 2, the national Poor People's Campaignorganized assemblies in over 30 states around the country to demand from our state legislatures as well as Congress that all resources necessary to provide living wages, affordable housing, food, good healthcare, and public programs be mobilized to end poverty and the hardship and death it inflicts on our people.
And where will those resources come from? Martin Luther King, Jr. gave us the answer. He identified racism, materialism, and militarism as the interlocking injustices that must be conquered if we are to achieve his vision of a just society.
King saw clearly the link between militarism and poverty.
Our military spending is now about $900 billion—eight times the entire Russian military budget. About 40% of that $900 billion goes to Raytheon, now RTX, and Lockheed Martin and other military contractors.
Just a portion of what taxpayers in each state send to the Pentagon and its weapons companies could end poverty in their states.
Since when is sending $16 billion on weapons to Israel for its war against Gaza more important than addressing poverty and housing and healthcare for those struggling to survive here?
That gigantic military budget is ramping up militarism, getting us into one war after another, jacking up the profits of Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics, killing Palestinians, and destroying our country's soul.
As King knew, there is a direct relationship between the poverty we see in our country and our state and the wars and militarism that has become the new normal. He knew that militarism is the enemy of the poor and must be attacked as such.
But don't we need a trillion dollar war budget to protect us from all the bad people out there?
Consider this: Of what use was this trillion dollar military behemoth in protecting us from the greatest national security threat we have faced in the last 70 years?
The Covid-19 virus killed 1,200,000 people in our country. (Do you remember the refrigerated trailers in New York City used to store the avalanche of dead bodies?)
The country with the biggest "defense" budget suffered far more casualties than any other country on Earth from a virus.Millions other lives were wrecked by this micro-organism.
It was a mental health catastrophe.
Businesses, schools, and medical facilities shut down.
Weddings, cultural events, social gatherings, family visits, memorial services were all cancelled.
We could not even visit and comfort and say goodbye to loved ones as they were dying.
The pandemic served as a searchlight, pointing out features of our society that had been invisible to us.
We were forced to see that millions of working Americans lived one paycheck away from disaster as the unemployed lined up in their cars, hoping to get free food because they couldn't afford to pay their rent and medical costs and afford food at the same time for even one month.
We were forced to see just how devastating the poverty and inequality at the core of our society actually is, determining vastly different impacts on many areas of life, including who lives and who dies, whose hopes and dreams are crushed and whose are just deferred.
This tiny virus was able to bring us to our knees in a way Russia or China or Iran never could. Nor did all the thousands of desperate migrants at our border ever threaten us in the least with the death, suffering, and disruption of the pandemic. Yet these are the countries and people against whom we gird ourselves instead of the apocalyptic threats of pandemics, global warming, and nuclear war.
Let's be clear on this:
The country with the biggest "defense" budget suffered far more casualties than any other country on Earth from a virus.
WE WERE NOT READY! We had put all our money and talent into war rather than public health.
Our multi-million dollar Raytheon Patriot missiles could not shoot the virus down.
Our billion dollar General Dynamics battleships could not sink it.
Our most sophisticated Lockheed and Boeing jets could not bomb it to pieces—the way they can do to the homes and bodies of people abroad.
The truth is, our weapons, our armies, our adoration of the military are useless in defending us against the actual threats to our national security.
Here the solutions are an effective and well-funded public health system; living wages, affordable housing, food, Medicare for all; a green new deal; world abolition of nuclear weapons—and a commitment to building a society and a world in which each person feels valued and respected.
On the day before he was killed, Martin Luther King, Jr. told us he went up to the mountain top. And from there he could see such a society being born. In moving toward that world, militarism must be conquered. It is the enemy of the poor. And so, it is the enemy of all of us moving toward that just society that King beheld from atop that mountain.
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