Disrupting the Calculation of Violence: James M. Lawson, Jr. and the Politics of Nonviolence

Abstract

This paper suggests nonviolence in the United States was a form of moral being with roots in Gandhism and the Christian tradition whose central architect was James M. Lawson, Jr. Commonly described as a leading “tactician” of nonviolence in the United States, this paper argues Lawson’s primary contribution to nonviolence was not tactical but intellectual, the adaptation of Gandhism into a mode of moral being calibrated to the particular political and racial context of the US South. Conceived as a moral method of social engagement, the politics of nonviolence contrasted sharply with the immoral system of racialized violence in the US. In tracing the intellectual lineage of nonviolence through the thinking and writings of Mohandas Gandhi, A.J. Muste, Howard Thurman, and James M. Lawson, this paper argues James Lawson’s reinterpretation of these previous religious intellectuals led him to conceive of nonviolence as a moral mode of political being in the modern United States.