Rev. James Lawson died yesterday. He was 95. Here are some compelling things about his life that we can meditate on and emulate today (curated from a few biographies and obituaries).

Lawson became a “conscientious objector” during the Korean War.  In April 1951, he was found guilty of violating the draft laws of the United States, and sentenced to three years in a federal prison. Upon his release from prison, Lawson returned to Baldwin-Wallace and earned his bachelor’s degree. 

In 1956, Lawson entered Oberlin College’s Graduate School of Theology. In 1957, one of Lawson’s professors introduced him to the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who urged him to move south and aid in the Civil Rights Movement.

“Don’t wait! Come now! We don’t have anyone like you down there,” MLK pleaded, according to author David Halberstam’s history of the civil rights movement, The Children. Rev. Lawson was outwardly “mild and gentle,” wrote Halberstam, “but he was a true radical Christian who feared neither prison nor death.”

Lawson enrolled at the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where he served as the southern director for Fellowship of Reconciliation and began hosting nonviolence training workshops for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.  There Lawson trained many of the future leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, including James Bevel, Diane Nash, John Lewis, Bernard Lafayette, and Marion Barry.

In 1960, Lawson was expelled from Vanderbilt for organizing the Nashville student sit-ins. 

Lawson moved to Memphis in June 1962, where he became pastor of Centenary Methodist Church, one of the largest churches in the city.  He also continued his organizing activity.  Throughout the decade, he led various community movements for racial justice in Memphis. 

Rev. Lawson was among the first Freedom Riders arrested in Jackson, Miss., in 1961, as the activists sought to integrate interstate bus and train travel. During the “Bloody Sunday” clash of March 1965, he was among the protesters beaten by authorities at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., during a march for voting rights.

In 1968, while involved in the sanitation workers strike, he invited Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis to speak where 15,000 people heard his famous “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop Speech.” King was assassinated in Memphis the following day on April 4, 1968.

In 1974, James Lawson moved to Los Angeles, California where he became pastor of Holman United Methodist Church and continued his social activism, advocating for Palestinian and immigrant rights; gay and lesbian issues; the poor; and an the end to war in Iraq. Rev. Lawson retired from Holman United Methodist Church in 1999.

In 2006, Vanderbilt, after expelling Rev. Lawson 46 years earlier, invited him to return as a visiting professor. He also accepted a request to leave his papers with the school’s archives.

In one of his first visiting lectures there, a student asked him about Islamic extremism. “I don’t happen to think that Islam is the most violent religion,” he answered. “I think Christianity is. As a Christian, I think we need to think about ourselves first and clean up our own act.”