WaPo: “The Rev. James M. Lawson, a United Methodist minister who became a principal tactician of nonviolent protest during the civil rights movement, leading sit-ins, marches and Freedom Rides that withstood attacks by mobs and police throughout the 1960s, died June 9. He was 95.
He died of cardiac arrest en route to a Los Angeles hospital, said his son J. Morris Lawson III….
King shared a zeal for Gandhi’s teachings and implored Rev. Lawson to put his beliefs into practice in the segregated American South.
“Don’t wait! Come now! We don’t have anyone like you down there,” he pleaded, according to author David Halberstam’s history of the civil rights movement, “The Children.”
The next year, Rev. Lawson headed to Vanderbilt University’s divinity school in Nashville, where he was one of the few Black people on campus. He began conducting workshops on nonviolent protest for King’s newly formed Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which was to become a central organization in the civil rights movement.”