You Better Come Home with Me by John Lawson

So it was a rather extraordinary group of people that came together in Nashville. Vivian and John Lewis were participants in that preparatory work and in the role playing and experimental sit-ins that we did. In preparation for that campaign, we did nonviolent workshops in which I talked about what I had learned about nonviolent struggle in studying the Montgomery bus boycott, Gandhi and the Indian independence movement and some of the campaigns in Africa and Europe. Vivian and John Lewis were both in that movement.

So what to me is an incredible story is that, as we planned the campaign that became the Nashville sit-in movement in 1959, ’60 and beyond, C.T. The conversation in the fall of ’58 was that if we were going to have a second major nonviolent campaign, which a lot of people were looking for, we would have to do it in Nashville where I lived. Vivian and John Lewis in Nashville, Tennessee, the Montgomery bus boycott had just ended. What was your impression of him as a young man? Lewis forged a lifelong bond with Lawson, who reflected on the late congressman’s formidable contributions to advancing justice.Ĭapital & Main: You met John Lewis when he came to Nashville and was one of your trainees in nonviolence. Lawson explains that he wasn’t training anyone but rather helping people learn “how you shape a life that is worthy of the gift of life.” For four months Lawson ran weekly workshops on the philosophy of nonviolent civil disobedience that examined the success of nonviolent campaigns around the world.

James Lawson was a key architect of that effort, together with young civil rights organizers John Lewis, Bernard Lafayette, Diane Nash, Rev. The Nashville approach led to the desegregation of cities across the Southeast including Atlanta and Memphis, along with Dallas, often with the active engagement of the local business community. called the 1960 campaign to integrate Nashville, Tennessee’s downtown business district the model movement for desegregating Southern cities.

You Better Come Home with Me by John Lawson