This week I speak with writer Emily Yellin, co-author of the new, posthumous memoir by the late Civil Rights leader Rev. James Lawson called Nonviolent: My Life of Resistance, Agitation and Love, which comes out on Feb. 17th from Random House.

Emily is a longtime writer for The New York Times. Jim Lawson was my friend for 34 years. I first met him in jail during a protest in 1990 and he later hired me to be director of the Fellowship of Reconciliation.

Dr. King called Jim Lawson “the greatest theoretician and strategist of nonviolence in the world.” Jim was taught nonviolence by his mother, went to prison for refusing to be drafted into the Korean war, spent years in India learning nonviolence from Gandhi’s friends, then returned to the US, joined Dr. King, and became the main strategist for the Civil Right movement, from the lunch counter sit-ins to the Freedom Rides to Birmingham, Selma, and the Memphis garbage workers’ strike.

(Jim did two zoom sessions with the Beatitudes Center before his death which you can watch on the free Beatitudes Center YouTube channel. You can read the transcript of the first one, “Nonviolence Is Power,” at www.beatitudescenter.org/blog/page/2/)

“One of the things that stunned me about Rev Lawson,” Emily tells me, “was his consistency with nonviolence that came from a deep conviction to love. Jim Lawson was the best example of how to live a life that leads with love and does no harm. One of his core teachings was, ‘We can't imitate the evil ways of our oppressors.’

"Nonviolence is the way to build a more loving and just world," is what Jim Lawson has taught us. Listen in and be inspired! God bless you!—Fr. John

beatitudescenter.org