“The voice of nonviolence has been once again shackled to a sentimental past.”

“Activist Ousted from Vanderbilt is Back, as a Teacher,” said the headline.  Most of the report was retrospective, recalling Lawson's days as dean of lunch-counter protests, his expulsion from campus, and later apologies from top administrators.  Chicago scholar Martin E. Marty was inspired by the story's concluding quote (printed above), and his column, too, bounced into my inbox, bringing new hope for nonviolence in the USA.  

But if we weigh carefully the images of the narrative of Lawson's return, we find that the voice of nonviolence has been once again shackled to a sentimental past, where the lead of living nonviolent militance gets buried under the bone-pile of segregation de jure.  As a result, the quote at the top of this story was found three paragraphs from the bottom of the story in The New York Times.

If Rev. Lawson has been missing from the Vanderbilt campus for half a century, he has not been missing from the world, as a search of New York Times archives will prove.  Yet his message of nonviolence has been missing from the New York Times these past six years of warmongering.  And before that, his opinions in the New York Times were tightly shackled to the confines of a Democratic Party (where should they hold the 2000 convention?), the King legacy (how wide the conspiracy surrounding the assassination?), or the beating of Rodney King (where Lawson's credentials as a “race man” of nonviolence were suddenly in dire need).  

Not to scapegoat the New York Times, we are reminded by a report from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) that from Oct. 2005 through March 2006 the PBS NewsHour presented “not a single peace activist.”  Next time someone asks you where the next Martin Luther King, Jr. is going to come from, you may answer nowhere, if the media have their way.

When the New York Times followed Lawson onto the Vanderbilt campus, his significance got swallowed up into a story of “Southern progress” where nonviolence, once upon a time wrongfully banned, now returns to confront bigotry in the open.  But Lawson's voice is bigger than that, and the New York Times has the power to recognize the significance of Lawson's international leadership as such.  “From Nashville,” the headline might say, “a voice of conscience rises to challenge a new status quo.”  Dare we choose not to listen this time?

As Lawson himself tells the history of “the years of high adventure” that followed Rosa Parks, he reminds us that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., framed the bus boycott of Montgomery, “not as a Black-White issue, but as a justice issue, an issue about love, as an issue about a victory for the United States and all the people of Montgomery, Alabama.

“How obscene it seems to me,” says Lawson, “is the fact that so many people there in Montgomery could not hear or feel or realize the love and 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.”

“So long as evils persist of any sort, the spirit of nonviolent leadership exerts itself forward.”

As Lawson sees it, the civil rights movement carried into history a philosophy and practice of nonviolence that cannot be confined to the particular evils of Jim Crow segregation.  So long as evils persist of any sort, and in a world of sin they will persist, the spirit of nonviolent leadership exerts itself forward into new confrontations against evil - and new cooperations with emerging communities of conscience.  

"The danger to our country is worse than most of us know," said Lawson to an audience at Cornell University.  Voicing analysis from the nonviolent tradition, Lawson claimed that, “America has become a society that is a culture of violence, racism, sexism and addiction. The worst addiction is materialism, he added, saying, 'We are stumbling systematically into greater chaos.'

“He described the reasons,” reports Linda Grace-Kobas for the Cornell Chronicle: “a justice system that has jailed 2 million people - 67 per cent of them people of color; thousands of jobs being cut to satisfy Wall Street; lack of an Equal Rights Amendment; globalization, and the growing 'security state' the United States is importing into South America. 'The U.S. has become the number-one enemy of peace and justice in the world today,' he said.”  That was Lawson speaking seven months before Sept. 11, 2001.

For his acceptance speech at the 2004 peace award from the Community of Christ (a monogamous denomination of Mormons) Lawson selected a reading from Micah in which “the latter days” would be days when, “they shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore.”

“I want you to understand very clearly that the movement of those years was a movement of the people of God, was a movement of the Churches, more than a 'Civil Rights Movement,'” said Lawson.  Confining that movement to a Civil Rights Movement, Lawson argued, is “the way that 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 has a need, whatever be that need, represents all of us, or none of us can express the love or purpose of God.”

“The U.S. has become the number-one enemy of peace and justice in the world today.”

Beyond Civil Rights grew a movement of ten thousand protests, a coalition of conscience that swept in Head Start for pre-school children, Medicare, accessible immigration, federal scholarships for college students, and affordable housing.  Much of this, as we know was soon swept backward by the Reagan revolution, which continues today.

“The point I'm making here,” said Lawson, “is you cannot depend upon government or Congress to do the right thing.  If we are people that believe firmly that we are all equal, and 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.  

“If you believe that all of the people of God, that all of us 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, but by reaching out to others and building a community of Christ, a community of struggle, a community of hope that turns this land of ours into genuinely a land that is home for every boy and for every girl.”

From the South, again, comes a voice for the self-liberation of America's people.  Last time around, that voice did liberate the larger world. It's high time to return the favor, and unshackle that voice from the hold where we keep it.

Greg Moses is editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review and author of  Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of Nonviolence.  He can be reached at gmosesx@prodigy.net