The gripping firsthand account of the courage it takes to change a nation, from the Rev. James Lawson Jr—peer of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., mentor to Congressman John Lewis and the Freedom Riders, and lifelong proponent of nonviolence as a powerful system for social transformation.

Throughout his rich life, Rev. Lawson worked to dismantle racial, social, and economic injustice. Dr. King called Rev. Lawson, “the leading strategist and theorist of nonviolence in the world.” This vital, first-person account portrays Rev. Lawson engaged in galvanizing and often harrowing campaigns of nonviolent direct action—a radical, disciplined, far-reaching method of redemptive revolution centered in love and moral clarity.

Rev. Lawson's story spans his more than nine decades, as well as his abolitionist heritage. He served prison time during college for resisting the Korean War draft and then traveled to India and Africa, where he immersed himself in Gandhi’s philosophy and tactics and met with emerging African independence leaders. In 1957, Dr. King urged Lawson to “come South now,” and a historic solidarity was born.

Rev. Lawson was vital to desegregating downtown Nashville in the early 1960s. He trained the Little Rock Nine, the Mississippi Freedom Summer volunteers, and countless other civil rights foot soldiers. He co-led the 1963 Birmingham campaign, the 1966 Meredith March Against Fear, and the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers' strike. Throughout his life he stood up to two particularly pervasive forms of violence in the United States: police brutality and what he called plantation capitalism. After moving to Los Angeles in the 1970s, he continued the quest for economic and racial equity, and for women’s and LGBTQ+ rights. Well into the twenty-first century, he helped foster a more inclusive labor movement and an enduring immigrant rights movement.

Rev. Lawson practiced what he preached, always recognizing and respecting the inherent dignity of every human being—even those who opposed him. Nonviolent is at once a riveting historical narrative from an architect of one of the most influential and inspiring global liberation movements, and an ode to what it means to compel a nation to live up to its founding ideals of liberty and justice for all.