File #: RS2024-380    Name:
Type: Resolution Status: Passed
File created: 4/15/2024 In control: Metropolitan Council
On agenda: Final action: 4/16/2024
Title: A resolution recognizing the Reverend James M. Lawson, Jr. for his leading role in the civil rights movement in Nashville and Davidson County and his decades for work promoting non-violence and equality.
Sponsors: Zulfat Suara, Clay Capp, Kyonzte Toombs, Brenda Gadd, Terry Vo, Burkley Allen, Jason Spain
title
A resolution recognizing the Reverend James M. Lawson, Jr. for his leading role in the civil rights movement in Nashville and Davidson County and his decades for work promoting non-violence and equality.

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WHEREAS, the Rev. James M. Lawson, Jr., has spent a lifetime teaching non-violent direct action, organizing and engaging in civil rights efforts, and advocating for equality across the country; and

WHEREAS, Rev. Lawson trained in Ghandi's use of nonviolence to achieve social and political change while living in India as a missionary in the 1950s; and

WHEREAS, Rev. Lawson moved to Nashville to enroll in Vanderbilt University's Divinity School in 1957 after the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. encouraged him to move to the American South to teach non-violence on a larger scale; and

WHEREAS, Rev. Lawson organized workshops and taught the methods and ideals of non-violent direct action to community members and university students in Nashville, including Diane Nash, John Lewis, Bernard Lafayette, the Rev. C.T. Vivian, and Ernest "Rip" Patton; and

WHEREAS, the Nashville Student Movement soon conducted lunch counter sit-ins at various downtown Nashville stores in 1960, which led to heated backlash, violence, and more than 150 arrests of the student demonstrators; and

WHEREAS, as the sit-ins accelerated in Nashville, Rev. Lawson's role with the Nashville Student Movement led to his expulsion from the Vanderbilt Divinity School, an action for which the university later apologized and conceded was wrong; and

WHEREAS, on April 19, 1960, after the bombing of attorney Z. Alexander Looby's home, the Nashville Student Movement and Rev. Lawson marched in protest to the Nashville Courthouse and confronted Nashville Mayor Ben West, who conceded that segregation was wrong and that lunch counters in the city should be desegrated; and

WHEREAS, thanks to Rev. Lawson's work, Nashville became the first major Southern city to begin desegregating its public facilit...

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