Reverend Lawson said that:
“The imminence of death was a part of the discipline we lived with, but no one as much as King.”
Lawson died on Sunday.
The discipline of hope, was a phrase of Mariame Kaba. That we cannot afford despair, was a teaching of James Baldwin.
That “the imminence of death was part of the discipline,” makes me curious to inquire about the other parts of the discipline. In addition to mortality what constitutes the rest of made it whole? complete?
Reading these two obituaries of Rev Lawson, I’m absorbing the bewilderment that:
1) MLK would be 95 this year
2) Lawson seemingly nudged King to go to India to experience the teachings of Gandhi in the popular resistance movement
3) Lawson was immersed in the sanitation workers strike in Memphis in April 1968.
That he was the first Black student accepted at Vanderbilt’s divinity school only to be expelled by the school for his instrumental role in teaching the university students and people trained to resist the urge to fight back during the sit-ins, speaks to the countless ways that the university cannot be an island of anti racism in a sea of violent, genocidal White supremacy and how the Black students on a university campus are in but not of that university as Robin Kelley wrote in Black Study, Black Struggle in 2016.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 