How American activist James Lawson took non-violence from India to the US to fight against racism

In the centre of India, in a city called Nagpur famous for its santaras, or tangerines, the Church of Scotland was running Hislop College, named after Stephen Hislop, a Scottish missionary who had worked in areas surrounding Nagpur for eighteen years until his death by drowning in 1863.

David Moses, a Harvard PhD and Hislop’s head from 1941, was the first Indian in that position. Struck by Lawson’s embrace of jail, Moses, who was looking for a man of God who would also help Hislop’s students with sports and athletics, asked if the prisoner paroled in 1952 would serve in Nagpur for three years as campus minister and coach. A three-year Methodist Missionary Program would fund the appointment.

A natural athlete who had enjoyed his sandlot sessions, Lawson was more than willing. Here was a totally unexpected chance to study Gandhi further and enter into the climate in which he had conducted his nonviolent forays. Also appealing was the opportunity to live for a while outside the US, in another culture, and to look at his beliefs from a new vantage point.

More clearly aware than most of his compatriots that the world was larger than the US, Lawson had also internalised a fact of history that most Americans had overlooked: Jesus was not only not an American, he was not white either. Besides, India in the 1950s seemed closer than the US to the unindustrialized world in which Jesus had lived nearly two millennia earlier. A spell in India could enhance Lawson’s understanding of the world, and of Jesus too.

By now, moreover, he felt certain in his mind that the US would witness a major nonviolent assault on racism. Lawson did not know where or when the charge would occur, but occur it would, and he “would be part of it”. India seemed a good place to prepare himself for what the struggle might demand of him.

He therefore jumped at the Nagpur opportunity. However, the Indian visa didn’t come through until the following year, and it was April of 1953 by the time Lawson reached the city of the tangerines.

He shared a faculty bungalow on Hislop’s campus in Nagpur’s prestigious Civil Lines. Most non-Indians in Nagpur owned cars but Lawson was content with a bicycle. Heeding advice, he was careful with water and food, but he found the local fare just fine and his stomach coped with what he was eating. At times he wore Indian clothes.

Apart from helping with the students’ spiritual and moral tone, Lawson was expected to raise their athletic abilities. The sports role brought him close to dozens of young Indians. It also enabled him to travel across India. A basketball team he trained at the Nagpur YMCA went with him to Madras, Bangalore, Delhi, and Calcutta, all places where local YMCAs wished to promote basketball.

Living amidst Indians of varied castes, religions, and income levels, and next to some non-Indians as well, Lawson tried to understand India’s complexities. He couldn’t agree with fellow missionaries who saw the Christian and Western worlds as synonymous, or who were inclined to blame native religions for India’s problems, including its widespread poverty.

To his surprise, Lawson found that some missionaries as well as influential Indians seemed to disdain Gandhi. In their eyes, Gandhi had been too Indian or too much of a Hindu and therefore incapable of launching India into industrial or technological success. Moreover, some of them saw the Gandhi who had led a sequence of nonviolent revolts as “a troublemaker”.

That Gandhi was a Hindu was not a problem for Lawson, who would say to me in a 2020 interview:

Well before my India visit, when I was in college and faced the draft question, I had become skeptical of the dogmas of Christianity. I was never in sympathy with the missionary enterprise that the people of the rest of the world ought to be converted to Christianity. I had formed the view that a person, every person, is a major category, an autonomous category, gifted with autonomy and with personal accountability for that gift… That the paths toward Truth and God are manifold, very much more than one or two.

Lawson’s admiration for Gandhi, and for Gandhi’s unbending opposition to British colonial rule, grew in Nagpur as he continued his researches about the man, which were facilitated by the fact that Sevagram village, where Gandhi spent much of his time from the mid-1930s onwards, lay only about fifty miles from Nagpur and was very close to the town of Wardha, the site for some of Gandhi’s educational and economic experiments.

Lawson also found much to like in Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, about whom he had read a fair amount while keeping track of India’s freedom struggle. Lawson briefly met Nehru a couple of times in New Delhi, India’s capital, heard him more often on the radio, usually on how to develop India via democracy, and empathized with Nehru’s refusal to align with the US in the Cold War.

Travelling to Pavnar village, about forty miles from Nagpur, Lawson talked with Gandhi’s close and remarkable associate, Vinoba Bhave (1895–1982), who had inspired landowners across India to donate lands to tens of thousands of the landless. This interview was joined by a south Indian Gandhian and Christian, his name untraced, who was apparently associated with FOR.

Seeing himself as “a student throughout of freedom movements in India, Africa, South America, Latin America”, Lawson also got to know many African students studying in Nagpur.

Among the Gandhi books he devoured in Nagpur was the two-volume Nonviolence in Peace and War. Published in 1942, it contained articles by Gandhi and by his secretary, Mahadev Desai, who had died in prison during that year.

One of Desai’s pieces in the book was an account of a three-hour conversation occurring in February 1936 between Gandhi and an African American delegation led by a man Lawson admired, the theologian-philosopher Howard Thurman. The others in that delegation were Thurman’s wife Sue Bailey Thurman, a Methodist minister named Edward Carroll, and the latter’s wife Phenola Carroll. The four called on Gandhi in his hut in Bardoli in western India.

After Gandhi had “engaged his guests with questions about racial segregation, lynching, African American history, and religion”, there was a discussion about nonviolence. Gandhi claimed that “despite the negative particle ‘non’, nonviolence was no negative force”. It was positive and required “direct action”. Moreover, “love” was nonviolence’s critical component. Altogether, claimed Gandhi, nonviolence was a force “more powerful than electricity or ether”.

Desai wrote that he and Gandhi had “sat enraptured” as Sue Bailey Thurman rendered two spirituals, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” and “We are climbing Jacob’s Ladder”. Before they left, Gandhi expressed to the visitors his belief that African Americans were going to lead the world in nonviolence.

Lawson found the discussion and Desai’s account of it “extraordinary”. “It almost has become for me”, he would say in 2010, “a kind of a piece of scripture because I learn something new from it all the time as I read it.”

The fact that by the year 1936 Gandhi had sensed, in his village thousands of miles away from America, the potential power of the African American struggle – the potential global power of that struggle – and had sensed also the connection between that power and a commitment to nonviolence, stirred Lawson in 1953, and continued to stir him until the end of his life.

Excerpted with permission from James Lawson: Teacher of Satyagraha, Rajmohan Gandhi, Speaking Tiger Books.