Rev. Jacob (James) M. Lawson (1882-1976)
Written by Jade Ferguson
Born in December 1882, Jacob (James) Morris Lawson was the son of Henry Lawson II and Sophia Still. James’s grandfather, Henry Dangerfield Lawson I, came to Canada through the underground railway in the 1840s. After overpowering and strangling his owner with his own whip, he escaped slavery in Virginia. He then settled with his brother, William, in the Queen’s Bush. The surname Lawson was added to Henry’s name to honour the abolitionist who assisted in his escape.
James’s father, Henry Lawson II, married Sophia Still in 1864. Henry and Sophia had ten children. Henry worked as a farm labourer in Peel Township. By 1891, the family had left the farm and moved to Guelph. Children were central to the Essex St BME congregation. James Lawson’s intellect and talent was a “general interest” to Rev. Minter’s work of “advancing the young people in every department” of the Church. Still in his teens, James “qualified for ministry in the British Methodist Episcopal Church” (Dickerson 171). James is listed as a “local preacher” in Guelph in the 1901 Canada Census.
In 1904, James married Annie Harriet Trusty from St. Catharines in Lincoln, Ontario. For the next ten years, James served various congregations in North Buxton, Brantford, St. Catharines, and London. In an interview with James’s son, Rev. James M. Lawson Jr. describes his father’s aspirations for “greater opportunity”: “he was ordained in the British Methodist Church which was the Black church in Canada. It was small and limited and Dad was more ambitious. He studied under one or two white ministers in Guelph and then went on to McGill University for further studies” (Lefer 28). In 1913-14, James Sr. was a student of the Wesleyan Theological College; the 1914 McGill University Yearbook includes a description of his cohort: “Most of them are older than the average student, and are working their way through college under circumstances, often, of particular hardship and self-sacrifice” (138). Like his fellow classmates, James Sr. was an older student, in his thirties, married, and father to two young boys. In addition to sharing “particular hardship and self-sacrifice” with his classmates, James Sr. would have experienced a sense of isolation and loneliness as being one of the first Black students studying at McGill University.
In 1915, the Lawsons immigrated to the United States where they were “Imbued in the Wesleyan tradition, the Lawsons often traveled from place to place, setting up new congregations” (Wynn). He became a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in “rural Massachusetts, and then in New York State–in Jamestown, Elmira, Rochester, Syracuse, and Ithaca.” He was “a transitional figure in the church, both a literalist in terms of the Bible—an old-fashioned man who believed the Bible enjoined against vices like smoking and drinking—and an activist too, who, wherever, he went, organized and found both an NAACP and an Urban League.” After his wife Annie died in 1919, James Sr. married Philane Cover, a nurse and seamstress from Jamaica. The family was constantly on the move: a “child was born in almost every town he preached in—nine children in eight cities” (Halbertsam).
While his “social concern and compassion” was reflected in his sermons, he also fought to protect and transform his parishioners everyday lives. James Sr. believed in “self-defence, never yield[ing] to racial oppression.” While James Sr. pastored in Alabama and South Carolina, he “wore on his hip a thirty-eight pistol and insisted he was going to be treated as a man.” James Sr. “refused to take any guff from anyone, particularly on the point of race” and “interfered when he saw Negroes being mistreated” in Gadsden, Alabama (Dickerson 171). His tour of Sharon, South Carolina “ended one day when he watched a group of white men beating up a black boy. Lawson had waded in, stopping the fighting, rescued the boy, and taken him home, where he had found the boy’s house locked up and the windows shuttered. The smell of fear was everywhere. Lawson was absolutely sure some members of the family were inside….He decided right then and there that the kind of ministry he wanted to run was hopeless in South Carolina.” James Sr. left the South, and he “took the pastorate of a black Methodist church in Massillon, Ohio” (Halberstam).
Since their great-grandfather’s escape from slavery, violence had an evolving role in the Lawson family. The children of James Sr. “saw ministerial militancy modelled in his father, and was taught by his mother how to channel it into nonviolent methodology” (Dickerson 172). They were taught by their father to be proud and defend themselves against racial assault and discrimination; however, their mother did not agree with her husband’s position. She “believed that nothing was ever settled by the use of force” (Halberstam).
These dual lessons informed the life work of James Sr.’s son, Rev. James Lawson Jr., who went on to make critical contributions to the Civil Rights Movement. Describing the essential role of pastors in the Black Freedom Struggle, Rev James Lawson Jr. describes ministry as “not primarily preaching Sunday morning and the worship…but ministry and servanthood involve connecting with people and trying to help them be strengthened in their fight, in their struggle. My dad and Martin [Luther King]’s dad felt the same way and we learned from their example” (Lefer 24).
During the 1950s and 1960s, James Jr. trained activists in in nonviolent resistance: “Lawson and the Nashville student leaders were influential in the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.” He also “participated in the third wave of the 1961 Freedom Rides. In 1968, at Lawson’s request, King traveled to Memphis, Tennessee, to draw attention to the plight of striking workers in the city.” Dr. Martin Luther King described James Jr. as one of the “noble men“: “He’s been going to jail for struggling; he’s been kicked out of Vanderbilt University for this struggling; but he’s still going on, fighting for the rights of his people” (King Encyclopedia). The product of an activist family, James Jr. carried on his family’s legacy of freedom fighting. Rev. James M. Lawson Sr. died in 1976 in Cleveland, Ohio.