Permission Page
I give permission for public access to my Honors paper and for any copying or digitization to be done at the discref n of the College Archivist and/or the College Librarian.
Signed
Anthony C. Si cusa III
11 May 2009 Developing an American Ahimsa: The Rev. James M. Lawson Jr. s Paradigm of Protest
Anthony C. Siracusa III
Department of History Rhodes College Memphis, Tennessee
2009
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Arts degree with Honors in History This Honors paper by Anthony Siracusa has been read and approved for Honors in History.
Dr. Charles W. McKinney Project Sponsor
Dr. Gail S. Murray Second Reader
Dr. Luther D. Ivory Extra-Departmental Reader
Dr. Gail S. Murray Department Chair 111
Acknowledgements
This thesis is the product of a question I asked four years ago: why was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis in 1968? I found an answer easily enough, and that was James M. Lawson Jr. asked King to come to Memphis. But how Lawson knew King and why King came to Memphis in spite of his closest advisors warnings is a much longer story than this thesis can or should tell. However, I was compelled that Lawson knew King so well, and so I traced his life backwards from Memphis to his upbringing. This work has occupied much of my time at Rhodes College. Dr. Charles McKinney has been a source of constant inspiration and a model of academic rigor, and his unwavering support and assistance from my first semester until know has been invaluable. Dr. Steven Haynes and Dr. Timothy Huebner supervised and directed my first in-depth study of Lawson during the 2007 Rhodes Institute for Regional Studies, providing guidance and insight as I focused on Lawson s activity in Memphis, TN from the time he arrived here in 1962 until the eve of the sanitation strike in 1968. My research on Lawson continued in the fall of 2007 under the supervision of Dr. Gail Murray in a seminar on the Memphis Sanitation Strike of 1968. I began formal work on this thesis through a directed inquiry in the spring of 2008 under the tutelage of Dr. McKinney and began writing the thesis under the supervision of Dr. Luther Ivory in the fall of 2008. This work, like all historical work, is the product of an ongoing dialectic between scholars and the past and so I owe a debt of gratitude to my advisors mentioned above, and to Wesley Hogan for stunning scholarship and timely advice; to Ben Houston for his unpublished manuscript on Nashville; to Scott McDuffie for his thesis on Lawson; and to the History Department at Rhodes College for the inspiration, the faith and the insights borne from countless conversations on things only historians care about. iv
Table of Contents
Signature Page .ii
Acknowledgements iii
Table of Contents iv
Abstract
Permission Page
Introduction 1
Chapter 1: Life in the Shadow of a Methodist Pulpit .4
Chapter 2: Deciding to Live as an Activist: Sit-ins, Jail and a Pilgrimage .20
Chapter 3: James Lawson