James Lawson Returns to Vanderbilt

Budding civil rights leader James Lawson was expelled from my alma mater, Vanderbilt Divinity School, in 1960 for organizing nonviolent sit-ins at Nashville lunch counters. (As I understand it, he was expelled by the University's Board of Trust without the blessing of the Divinity School faculty; many divinity professors resigned in protest.) Now Lawson is back at Vanderbilt Divinity as a visiting prof.

From Ciona Rouse and the UM News Service:

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (UMNS) - Decades following his expulsion from Vanderbilt University as a student, civil rights pioneer James Lawson will return as a distinguished visiting professor for the school's 2006-07 academic year. . . .

After his expulsion from Vanderbilt, Lawson continued his work for justice, serving as director of nonviolent education for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, as pastor of Centenary United Methodist Church in Memphis and as chairman of the strategy committee for the Memphis sanitation workers' strike in 1968, during which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. . . .

"Permanently expelled from Vanderbilt, James Lawson would have done fine and well. But Vanderbilt could not be fine or well without confronting its troubled soul," said [Divinity School Dean James] Hudnut-Beumler.