SUMMARY: Civil Rights leader Rev. James Lawson describes four lessons from the King Movement (1955-1972): “First, we had a passion and a conviction that God was calling us to do something in the presence of wrong. Second, we discovered that we could make a massive change in the mind and the heart of the United State. Third, because of the tramping feet and the millions of people who heard a conscience talk about equality, liberty, and justice for all, Congress passed some of the most significant legislation on behalf of people that it has ever passed. Fourthly, I discovered again, not only in my own life, but also in the life of this nation a force more powerful: the power of non-violent understanding and struggle and methodology.”

Sisters and brothers, I am delighted to be here and appreciative in ways that I cannot express of your generosity in making me the 11th awardee for your international peace award. As I think about all this, I'm pretty much filled with a deep sense of gratitude and appreciation, and there are so many gratitudes in my life and heart that I cannot express all of them by any means anyway, but I want you to know how wonderful it has been to be here the last day, the last 24 hours or so, to get better acquainted with the Community of Christ, and to find deep thanksgiving for you and for the many different ways in which you are engaged in ministries around the world. I want to express my appreciation to Grant McMurray, the president of your church, to the gentle, easy-going ways of Andrew Bolton, who from the day he called me, December 11, 2003, until the present moment, has been a wonderful presence. It's great to see in him a colleague in this road that we all share. I wanted Dorothy to be up here with me to receive this award because I am a consequence and effect of her life and her witness in so many different ways. And in fact, whatever I am or whoever I can yet be is in large measure a consequence of Dorothy's life and witness and love.

I have been asked to speak from the theme of "Lessons from the King Movement: Lessons for Zion in the 21st Century," and you must understand that in some ways that's an impossible task because I have been engaged in this ministry of reconciliation since minimally the age of 10 or 11, so it's been a good 60 years. But that ministry, that work, trying to, what I still say today, to follow Jesus, has been the centerpiece of my own spirituality, the centerpiece of my own study, the centerpiece of my work as a pastor. And as a pastor who thinks that the love and life and work and ministry and ideas and mind of Jesus is for the whole person and for the whole world. That there's nothing in our lives, nothing in the world, that should be excluded from the dialogue with that Word made flesh in Jesus of Nazareth. And I want to simply also add that this is my 55th year in the ministry in the Methodist church. Many of those years I lived as a pastor of congregations, helping them to build, helping them to expand their understanding of ministry; and they surely, those people, are surely a great part of my being here this evening.

I cannot distill this into a few words, but I want to try to lift up for you very briefly a little of what we are calling "Lessons from 1955 - 1972." Sometimes when I date this in my thinking, I date it from 1952 to 1972 or 1974, but those years of massive impact upon this country of which I was a part. And to try to hang my thoughts, I want to read quite quickly and briefly a great vision that within recent years has taken on larger meaning for my own life and work, and it’s the vision that you find in Micah, the prophet Micah, the fourth chapter, the first five verses. And you'll recognize this because the earlier version is found in chapter two of the book of Isaiah, but as I've read and reread these things over the years, it seems to me the Micah edition of the vision is a larger and better one, and expanded. It sounds like Isaiah, but there's some key places in it that I think are appropriate for us this evening.

It shall come to pass in the latter days
that the mountain of the house of the Lord
shall be established as the highest of the mountains,
and shall be raised up above the hills;
and people shall flow to it,
and many nations shall come and say:
“Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord,
to the house of the God of Jacob;
that [God] may teach us [God's] ways
and we may walk in [God's paths].”
For out of Zion shall go forth the law,
and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
[God] shall judge between many peoples,
and shall decide for strong nations afar off;
and they shall beat their swords into plowshares,
and their spears into pruning hooks;
nation shall not lift up sword against nation;
neither shall they learn war any more;
but they shall sit, every [person] under his own, his [or her] own vine
and under his [or her] own fig tree,
and none shall make them afraid;
for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken.

For all the peoples walk each in the name of its god,
but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God
forever and ever. (Micah 4:1-5 RSV)

Now, obviously, the movement to which 17 years of my life was given in the southeastern part of the country was a movement of high adventure for this country and for millions of us who participated in it in many different ways. I'm grateful for it, and will always be grateful for it. I will always be rather contented that God insisted in my preparations in the 1940s and 1950s so that I could be at a place where a blow could be struck against Jim Crowism and segregation, racism and their concomitant ills in this country.

I will always be grateful. Dorothy is a consequence of my being engaged in the movement. John, Morris, Seth were all born in Nashville and Memphis, Tennessee, so our family had deep roots in it. Many of the finest people I have known, or will ever know, were the result in part of our walking together, being in sit-ins together, and being in jail together in Nashville or Memphis or Mississippi or Alabama or Florida or somewhere in the country.

You should know that jail-going according to the Christian tradition, according to the tradition of non-violence, is to be a time of worship and study and fasting and thinking and talking and reading, if you can. And every jail experience in that movement for me was a movement of growth, with younger, older people, clergy, non-clergy people, where we tried to turn the jailhouse in Jackson, Mississippi and the Parchment State Penitentiary in Parchment, Mississippi into a sacred place, a holy place for the presence of the living Lord. So, it was a high adventure, and I can never forget those years and I can never forget how those years helped to change me, transform me, make my life larger, my vision higher, and more, and nobler, than the rest.

I must still do the work one day of writing an essay on lessons from that movement, and tonight I am only going to try to touch bits and pieces of it. But you should know that there is such a thing as a Rahab of the movement. Her name was Rosa Parks. When on December 1st, 1955 she simply sat on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama and said, "No!" And, there was a Joshua in Montgomery at the same time by the name of Martin Luther King, Jr.. On December the 5th, the first day of the boycott, in a standing-room-only crowd at Hope Street Baptist Church, Martin King had preparation from the past and from the present so that he framed the boycott not as a black-white issue, but as a justice issue, as an issue about love, as an issue about a victory for the United States and for all the people of Montgomery, Alabama.

How obscene, it seems to me, is the fact that so many people there in Montgomery could not hear or feel or realize the love and the compassion that 50,000 Black people exemplified and manifested as the presence and glory of God by seeking to resist an evil by doing right. And both King and Gandhi have said it so very well. I think that it's to be found in the rootage of the Hebrew-Christian scriptures - that the person who loves God has as much responsibility to boycott evil and sin and to resist them, as they have a responsibility to cooperate with love and truth and beauty and goodness. It's a double-edged responsibility, and yet so many people could not understand that that movement that began at that point represented a mark in history in which none of us would ever be again the same unless we wanted to deliberately walk in the way of the deadly past so much so that we would shrivel up our own souls and hearts.

I want you to understand that the movement of those years was a movement of the people of God, a movement of the churches, more than a civil rights movement. That's the way in which our racist nation relegates the necessity of Black need and justice to a peripheral place in our nation, rather than recognizing any soul in this nation who is in need, whatever be that need, represents all of us or none of us. None of us can express the love or the purpose of God.

King represents the Moses of the last half of the twentieth century. King is to American life and history what Jesus was to the first-century history in the Roman Empire. I say that deliberately. People like Vincent Harding and Rabbi Abraham Heschel have said that the future of the United States will depend upon what it does with Martin Luther King, Jr. as God's highly spiritual and intellectual spokesperson for the twentieth century and the twenty-first century. That's, for me, a paramount lesson that you and I can learn. I look for the day when the Christian churches will, in the United States at least, read the speeches of King and the biographies of King and the history of the movement of those days and understand that it was a wonder-working God working in our midst.

I have to say that to you. Martin King didn't know what he was doing half the time. I never knew what we were doing. [laughter] To dare to go into Nashville, Tennessee and decide that God had a work to be done was idiocy, as I look back on it. And I did not know what I was doing, but I'll tell you what some of us had. We had a passion and a conviction that God was calling us to do something in the presence of wrong, and we had a conviction that the wrong was wrong for me, wrong for you, wrong for them, wrong for whoever lived in the White House, wrong for the Congress, wrong for the governors, wrong for the nation, wrong for a people who thought we could govern ourselves using "We hold these truths to be self-evident that all people are created equal, that they are endowed by God with certain inalienable rights that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." That, to me, sounds like it is grounded in Micah 4. So that's the first lesson I want to lift up.

Then, the second lesson I would lift up is this: we discovered that we could make a massive change in the mind and the heart of the United States. And we did. Let me see if I can just quickly sketch this for you. We have not solved all our problems in the areas of hospitality for one another. There is a vast distance for us yet to go, even in our churches. Some of you may recall, however, that in the ‘50s and ‘60s all across this country in waiting rooms and public buildings, in drugstore counters and restaurants, in skating rinks and movie theaters, there were signs that said something like this. In South Dakota, "No Indians allowed here." In Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the sign in the restaurant might say, "No Wop allowed here." In New York, it could say "No Jew." In Glendale, California, a few miles from where I live, the signs outside the town said, "No Negro is supposed to let the sun set on him in Glendale, California." In San Clemente, California, just down the road, signs said, "No Jew allowed in San Clemente. No Negro allowed in San Clemente." The signs in Nashville, Tennessee said "White Only," "Colored Only" over water fountains and restrooms and all types of places. And no one protested this.

I recall very well sitting in the Sugar Bowl as a teenager in Maslin, Ohio. They would not serve me, though I was a high school student and all the rest of it, they would not serve me. I sat in there once for a three-hour period, and could not even get a conversation going with the manager. Now, think for a moment what that was teaching us, and lots of people let it teach them, and they're still suffering the spiritual disease of what those signs taught. Some of those signs were by law: local, most of the time, or state. Other signs were by custom. Other signs were by the attitudes of people. We must recognize that our history that we often denied, laid that upon our land, and we are all inheritors of it.

Well, in Nashville, we had the audacity to say "We are going to begin the process of desegregating downtown Nashville." No one had ever thought about that. I know of no conversation in 1958, 59, or 60 - I went to lots of places and lots of meetings. I know of no conversation where there was a discussion about these terrible signs that need to come down, the terrible attitudes that need to change. Well, a group of young pastors, largely, and some laywomen of several churches began to talk about this and we met around it. We looked at all the issues that were ills facing Black people in Nashville, and we decided we're going to desegregate downtown Nashville. We began to recruit students to join us, and the rest of it is history.

We started the process whereby that movement took on new life, new enthusiasm, new power, new discipline, new training, and for the next decade or so, there were literally tens of thousands of demonstrations around the country, especially in the southeastern part of the country. The sit-in campaign, which became a national movement, the Freedom Rides in 1961. I could name each year a different campaign, a different movement. Hundreds, thousands of demonstrations, and the attitude that heartened the heart of millions and millions of Americans was this:" It's time we do something about it. Let's change it." And so Martin King speaks about a "coalition of change" that swept many of the churches, academia, that swept civic groups of all kinds. And the presidents and Congress were inundated with letters, with phone calls, that said "Let's change this and let's change it now."

So, as a consequence, and this is the third lesson, because of the tramping feet and the millions of people who heard a conscience talk about equality, liberty, and justice for all, Congress passed some of the most significant legislation on behalf of people that it has ever passed. Don't let people just tell you, "Well, it was a civil rights bill that was passed." No, do you know that Head Start was passed in that period and we campaigned and lobbied for it? Do you know that Medicare was passed in that period and we lobbied for it? Do you know that the immigration laws, which were immigration for only people from white Europe to the United States, were changed in 1965? Do you know that the first scholarships for students in higher education came from the federal government? The first effort of the federal government to say a part of our tax dollar should go into affordable housing. I don't know about this area of the country but I know that all around the world, housing, all around the United States, housing is becoming impossible for all kinds of people, younger and older, because the affordable housing budgets were stripped from the budget during the Reagan years of the presidency.

The point I am making here is: you cannot depend upon government or Congress to do the right thing if we are people [who do nothing]. [If we are people] who believe firmly that we are all equal, we are all God's children, that it doesn't matter where we come from, who we are, what color, what creed, what class, what culture, what gender, what orientation sexually, no matter, that if you believe that all are the people of God, that all of us ought to in our civic society, have access and opportunity and justice and hope -- then you need to believe above all in the power that you, yourself, have to make a difference in the world. Not by yourself. Not by yourself, but by reaching out to others and building the community of Christ, the community of struggle, the community of hope that turns this land of ours into generally a land that is home for every boy and for every girl. That's the third big lesson I learned.

And then the fourth one, and finally only the fourth one I want to life up, I discovered again, not only in my own life, but also in the life of this nation a force more powerful: the power of non-violent understanding and struggle and methodology. I wish I had five hours to talk to you about this, but I don't. But I want to say a couple of things about it. The movement was the most important movement of the people of America in our 350 or 385 years, because Martin King and others of us insisted that the gospel of Jesus advocates unconditional love, the grace of God that is the power of God for personal and social transformation. I want to correct something. I did not get my non-violence from Gandhi. I got my non-violence from Jesus and from my family as a boy in our home and the rest of it. I didn't begin to speak about it as non-violence until I became a freshman in college, but by that time I was absolutely persuaded that Jesus of Nazareth is the great non-violent warrior of every age. Gandhi said, "It's so strange that everyone who studies Jesus knows that he was a soul force, non-violent, spiritual athlete, except the Christians." [great laughter]

Let me put a footnote on this. We in religion, especially the Christian churches, must stop blessing war and violence in all their various masks. [great cheer and applause] How obscene it is for us to call Jesus the Christ of God and our Lord and Savior and then allow our culture, our politics, our national ethos to contort us not into the imagery of Jesus, but into the imagery of whatever is the politically conventional convenient time of the moment. Let me say to us as firmly as I can: Violence in all of its various forms - in the United States, domestic violence, two million women a year in the hospital because of domestic violence, a national disease - violence, in all its various forms, is the enemy of humanity. It is sin, not virtue. It is evil, not righteousness. It is time for there to be a rebellion in the Christian churches that demand that our preachers and our teachers stop blessing war, stop blessing domestic violence, stop pretending that little bits and pieces of violence is okay. It is not.

Violence is ineffective. Eighty years the struggle Israel and Palestine with how much violence steady escalation. Are there no human beings of common sense who will say "Now wait a minute, we've been trying that for 80 years. It hasn't worked. Should we not explore the possibility of other paths?" In the United States, we have been loading up our federal budget with military purposes, secret missions around the world, military bases in I don't even know anymore how many different countries, and we've gone almost every decade with violence, and it's left most of the people where we have fought wars worse off than they were before we entered the scene. Are there no people who are looking at the sociological consequences of our behavior over the last 80 years and recognize that we can do it better than that? That God has not left us impotent. That we can have a better world.

Non-violence in the 20th century became a major discipline and understanding of literature and history. Gandhi is to non-violence in the 20th century what Albert Einstein was to physics in the 20th century, and its time for you and I in the churches to catch up with this explosion of history, explosion of knowledge. The politics of non-violence is the most effective politics, and I maintain that God is in it and behind it and you and I need to decide to use it. I like the Micah vision, that noble vision, of all the peoples of the Earth coming together for conversation and talk and the rest of it. And you know it very well, breaking the swords into plowshares, but the end of the vision according to Micah: then, every human being will sit under their own fig tree and none will be afraid. If you're fearful in these days, you'd better listen to Micah as the source of security, and not the voices that come from too many nations and too much from our own country.

And then the other thing that I like about Micah is his statement at the end, and it goes that "For all the peoples walk, each in the name of its god." Now, isn't that a call to inter-faith engagement and conversation? All the peoples will walk in the name of its own god, of their own god. It's a call for diversity. It's a call for us to break out of our boxes of sameness, homogeneity, and to recognize that God's Earth is a glorious Earth, God's human race is a miracle in and of its self, that we have to take this human race out of the hands of the bombs and the militarists and the war presidents and so forth and so on. Out of the hands of the global corporations, plantation capitalism, out of the United States that wants the whole Earth to be its plantation. And we must insist that we will be among the people who will study war no more. That's been solidified in my own mind, in my own heart, in my own commitment, and in my continuing journey.

[sung] I ain't gonna study war no more
I ain't gonna study war no more
I ain't gonna study war no more, no more
I aint gonna study war no more
I ain't gonna study war, I ain’t gonna study war no more.

You can resolve the war in your own life. You can resolve the war in your community, your congregation. You can heal the war in our nation. We can make war a relic of a dead past that need never again threaten the well-being and the security of the human race. Amen.