138: Unabridged Interview: James Lawson

This is our unabridged interview with James Lawson. The US Civil Rights Movement, like Gandhi's Indian Independence Movement, was famously set apart by its employment of non-violent resistance methods. But have you ever wondered how such a movement was possible on so large a scale? In this episode, we are honored to have the man who Martin Luther King Jr. called friend, mentor, and the very conscience and architect of the Civil Rights Movement: Reverend James Lawson. Now in his 90’s, he discusses the United States’ past and present, and what it took to organize a whole population across the country to fight back without throwing a punch. “​​We started the public desegregation of the nation,” he says, “and we did it without hating anybody.”