On this day in 1960, Vanderbilt James Lawson sold out.

March 3, 1960

Vanderbilt University distributed James Lawson to participate in a sit-in in Nashville.

During the entire civil rights movement, he supported Martin Luther King Jr. in teaching the principles of non -violence. It was a lesson that learned lesson when he was young:

“I had thrown my first racial dress on me as a child. I struck this child and fought the child physically. Mom was in the kitchen and worked. When she told her the story, she said that without turning me to me: “Jimmy, what was it useful?” And at that time she made a long monologue about our lives and who we were and the love of God and the love of Jesus in our home in our community. And her last sentence was: “Jimmy, there has to be a better way.” In many ways, this is the decisive event of my life. ”

He joined the Methodist Art scholarship and made headlines when he refused to report to the draft in 1951. Then he traveled to India as a missionary, where he studied the non -violent teachings by Mahatma Gandhi.

Back in the USA he met King and the two started to work together.

“We were convinced that we could change the face of this nation through violent struggle and begin the process, in which we could really become a democracy with freedom, equality and justice for all people,” recalled Lawson.

When he pushed King, he dropped out the graduate school and joined the movement. Lawson was based on SIT-ins in Nashville. The student Diane Nash said she didn't think that violence would work, but told him that nobody else tried to do anything about this system.

The SIT-ins proved to be successful, and a year later Lawson and his students joined the freedom to be arrested again, this time in Mississippi for violating the segregation laws. Instead of bringing them to the local prison, the drivers were brought to the notorious prison of the state, who were known locally as Parchman Farm.

When he was finally released about 40 days later, he and other drivers met with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, which led to President John Kennedy and this bus seats were no longer restricted by the race.

In 1962 he became a pastor of the Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis. Six years later, he invited King to speak to the support of sanitary employees just to see how his friend was murdered the next day.

“Our country is a country,” he said, “embedded, addicted to the mythology of violence.” That is why non -violence is still important, he said. “Our nation has to be changed.”

Lawson died on June 9, 2024 at the age of 95 in a hospital in Los Angeles.