Over thirty years ago when I was a graduate student at Vanderbilt University, just saying the name “Jim Lawson” would evoke admiration and awe among students and faculty at the Divinity School.  Thus I was thrilled when I learned that the man himself would speak tonight in the lecture series on Nonviolent Direct Action and Civil Resistance sponsored by the Psychology Department.  The 2013-2014 distinguished lecture series was hosted by the department’s Psychology of Peace and Violence Program, which was established at UMass ten years ago in order to train doctoral students and facilitate research in the area of group psychology, particularly as it relates to cooperation and conflict resolution.

Born in Pennsylvania in 1928 and now officially retired from the ministry, the Reverend James Lawson is currently a visiting faculty member at the California State University, Northridge.  He has had a long and distinguished career as a pastor and civil rights activist, working in the Deep South in the sixties and with other marginalized groups in southern California beginning in the seventies and continuing through the nineties.  While still in college, Lawson joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation, America’s oldest pacifist organization, and because he remained true to his principles, he was imprisoned briefly for refusing to be drafted to fight in the Korean War.  During the mid-fifties, he worked and studied in India.  Like Dr M L King himself, Lawson was inspired by India’s Mahatma Gandhi and the nonviolence he championed.

Before the lecture began in the Goodell Building at 7:30, long-time Pioneer Valley activists in the peace movement were recognized (and Chancellor Subbaswamy himself was in the audience).  Reverend Lawson’s talk was titled “Where do we go from here: Chaos or Community.”  I tried to take notes; below is my idiosyncratic distillation of the wisdom he imparted in his lecture.

First, things in the US will get worse before they get better, because the propaganda forces such as Fox News, Heritage Foundation, Tea Party, and the Koch Brothers have gathered strength.  We have become ignorant of history, but the past is never dead; it lives on in us.

Second, we are currently living under the influence of four forces of history: sexism, racism, violence, and plantation capitalism.  These are structures of systematic oppression, in which hierarchies are imposed and individual persons do not matter.  These forces cause a spiritual disease, and to cure the malaise, we need a concerted effort on the part of people of good will.  We need to stop categorizing people, or society will continue to be permeated with violence.

Third, in the late twentieth century, we were moving forward on a path toward eradicating these debilitating forces, but progress has slowed.  We need to emerge from this impasse.

So where do we go from here?

When we look at our own history, we notice that the Civil Rights Movement emerged from the political arena.  Although it’s somewhat counter-intuitive, the leaders of the movement had a more practical understanding of what they were doing (they didn’t necessarily use the term “civil rights”).  The leaders were concerned with jobs, with dignity, with “how black people were treated.”  The movement had many different dimensions; for example, school desegregation and sports integration were also part of it, in addition to Voting Rights.  The Freedom Movement that Reverend Lawson became a part of was a “nonviolent struggle,” often just to survive daily life.  The Montgomery Bus Boycott resonated because it was concrete: people who had worked long hours were physically exhausted and just wanted to sit down as they rode the bus home from work.  Perhaps they were just so tired that all they could do was sit quietly, and it became nonviolent resistance by default.

Gandhi himself, engaged in conversations with suffragists and pacifists and labor leaders, gradually developed the philosophy of resistance founded on the concept of ahimsa.  The Sanskrit word means literally “not to cause harm” and is an important principle in Hinduism and Buddhism.  Gandhi made the principle active rather than passive, by proposing that there is power in compassion.  He proposed the term satyagraha, which he described as the pursuit of truth not by inflicting violence on one’s opponent but rather by turning him from error by patience and compassion.  Reverend Lawson urged us to reclaim power; love and compassion can overcome hate and hardness, he said.

Our country appears to have gone to chaos, not community, which means that we need to think again about what we take for granted; we need to create methods and tactics to awaken people to the realization that we can be a better nation.  Twenty-first century activism has to relearn nonviolent practice; we need to be re-awakened to its possibilities.  We cannot allow the forces of spiritual wickedness to prevail; we must dismantle the structures of sexism, racism, violence, and plantation capitalism.  As a democratic society, we need to practice civic engagement; we need to organize locally and take risks in the public arena.

When we think of the titanic figures of the twentieth century, ironically, both Albert Einstein and Mahatma Gandhi often come to mind.  Einstein, of course, developed the theory of general relativity, one consequence of which was the atom bomb, while Gandhi promoted nonviolence as a means of transforming society (by the way, the two men corresponded).  Because we have the power to destroy ourselves, we need the principles of love and compassion to neutralize this destructive force.

Reverend Lawson concluded with a ringing call to continue the nonviolent struggle:  “Justice will still prevail.”