This wonderful book is a powerful reminder that moral clarity can improve the world. As a boy, Lawson had a \u201ctranscendent\u201d experience: \u201ca voice beyond myself\u201d forbid him from responding to racist taunts with violence. Thus began his lifelong commitment to nonviolence, which guided his work as an adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. and an organizer of sit-ins, strikes, and marches that helped to overturn discriminatory laws. A Methodist pastor who died in 2024, his self-portrait is eventful yet modest. In his 20s, during a 13-month prison term for refusing to register for the military draft, he refined his views on challenging \u201cevil social patterns,\u201d as he wrote in a 1951 journal entry. Foreign travel was also instructive. In India, he studied Gandhi\u2019s teachings on nonviolence, which informed one of Lawson\u2019s civil disobedience strategies\u2014\u201cflooding the jails\u201d with righteous protesters. Lawson ended his pastoral career in California, pushing for fairness in schools and the workplace, but his public life would be \u201cdefined\u201d by his 1960s civil rights work in the South. Faced with church burnings, daily assaults, and assassinations of numerous allies, some in the movement edged toward \u201crevolutionary violence.\u201d Lawson impressed upon young colleagues that such acts would in turn \u201cdestroy Black neighborhoods.\u201d He\u2019s transparent about missteps, blaming himself for tactical errors during the landmark Memphis sanitation workers\u2019 strike and for not doing more to combat sexism. His chapter on King\u2019s murder demonstrates his visionary courage. As seen in the archival interview transcripts and newspaper articles he cites, Lawson counseled his allies to refrain from retaliatory violence, which \u201cwould be a denial of [King\u2019s] life and work.\u201d This one belongs in every library in the U.S.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This wonderful book is a powerful reminder that moral clarity can improve the world. As a boy, Lawson had a \u201ctranscendent\u201d experience: \u201ca voice beyond myself\u201d forbid him from responding to racist taunts with violence. Thus began his lifelong commitment to nonviolence, which guided his work as an adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":5615,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-interesting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5614"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5614"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5614\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}