Inaugural James M Lawson, Jr. Humanitarian Award
November 19, 2015
Reverend James M. Lawson, Jr. has been called, “the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world” by Martin Luther King, Jr. and an “architect of the nonviolence movement” by Freedom Rider and Congressman John Lewis. Lawson began formally studying Gandhi’s principals of non-violent passive resistance during his three-year tenure in India as a Methodist missionary in the mid-1950s. However, Lawson had learned to use non-violent means to negotiate life’s challenges long before his time in Nagpur, India.