India

After serving time in prison, James Lawson worked as a Methodist missionary in Nagpur, India. He participated fully in the work of the community and studied the principles and strategies of non-violent action as taught and practiced by Mahatma Gandhi whose followers had won independence for India in 1947. Reading about the Montgomery bus boycott and the arrest of Rosa Parks in December 1955, Lawson realized that it was time to return to the United States to take his place in the actions and campaigns of the budding civil rights movement in America. Lawson took with him Gandhi’s teachings, which would sustain and inspire his work and spirit in the coming months and years, indeed for a lifetime.

[James Lawson at the Hyderabad
Workcamp in India]
April 1954
James M. Lawson, Jr. Papers
Vanderbilt University Special Collections

[James Lawson on His Bicycle in Nagpur, India]
Photograph, 1954
James M. Lawson, Jr. Papers
Vanderbilt University Special Collections

[James Lawson at His Typewriter in Nagpur India]
Photograph, 1955
James M. Lawson, Jr. Papers
Vanderbilt University Special Collections

[James Lawson with the Football Team Hislop College, India]
Photograph, 1955-56
James M. Lawson, Jr. Papers
Vanderbilt University Special Collections

[Gandhi’s Bed, New Delhi, India]
Photograph, 1953
James M. Lawson, Jr. Papers
Vanderbilt University Special Collections

[Telegram Permission to Accept Missionary Assignment to India]
Myron Patterson, Chief Probation Officer
Cleveland, Ohio, January 12, 1953
James M. Lawson, Jr. Papers
Vanderbilt University Special Collections

[Photographs taken by James Lawson, India, 1954]
James M. Lawson, Jr. Papers
Vanderbilt University Special Collections

“Education, Preparation, Negotiation”: Reverend James M. Lawson Jr. and His Legacy of Nonviolence

India