The Revolt of the Public Servant

Speaker(s): James Lawson, Del Shields (host)

Description: At the time of this program, Rev. James M. Lawson, Jr. (1928-) was best known as leader of the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers strike. The discussion begins with the question of whether public workers should be allowed to strike, and what factors should be recognized, and maybe ignored. It was Lawson who invited Rev. Martin Luther King to speak in Memphis in April 1968, where he was shot and killed the morning after the "mountaintop speech." Lawson is a United Methodist pastor, an American activist, and a university professor. He was a leading theoretician and tactician of nonviolence in the Civil Rights Movement. In the 1960s, he was a mentor to the Nashville Student Movement and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was expelled from Vanderbilt University for his Civil Rights activism in 1960. Lawson later served as a pastor in Los Angeles, California, for 25 years. He continued to work for Civil Rights and he received received the Community of Christ International Peace Award in 2004.

Length: 58:27
Recording Date: January 9, 1969
Recorded at: WRVR Radio Studio, New York City