Nonviolent: A Memoir of Resistance, Agitation, and Love

By Reverend James Lawson Jr and Emily Yellin

The posthumous memoir of 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 nonviolent resistance as a powerful method for changing the world.

Throughout his rich life, Rev. Lawson worked to dismantle racial, social, and economic injustice. Dr. King called him the world's leading strategist of nonviolence, and John Lewis called him the architect of the Civil Rights Movement. In this vital, first-person account, Rev. Lawson goes to prison for refusing to join the Korean War draft, spends three years in India and Africa in the 1950s, and engages in successful but often harrowing campaigns in the American South of nonviolent direct action--a radical, disciplined, far-reaching system of revolution, centered in love and moral clarity.

Rev. Lawson taught nonviolence to the Little Rock Nine, the Mississippi Freedom Summer volunteers, and countless other civil rights foot soldiers. He was a leader in the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, the 1963 Birmingham campaign, the 1966 Meredith March Against Fear, and the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers' strike.

Nonviolent provides a rare and intimate look into Rev. Lawson's life--portraying a man who consistently recognized the inherent dignity of everyone, even those who opposed him. Rev. Lawson's narrative challenges all forms of violence, including police brutality, enforced poverty, and what he called plantation capitalism. And he shows his quest continuing well into the twenty-first century, as he helps foster a more inclusive labor movement and an enduring immigrant rights movement in Los Angeles.

Nonviolent is at once a riveting historical narrative from a central figure in global liberation, and an ode to what it means to compel a nation to live up to its founding ideals of liberty and justice for all.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0593596242
• ISBN13: 9780593596241
• Release Date: February 2026
• Publisher: Random House
• Length: 688 Pages
• Weight: 2.10 lbs.