[2][3] He was expelled from Vanderbilt University for his civil rights activism in 1960, and later served as a pastor in Los Angeles for 25 years.

[7] He went as a Methodist missionary to Nagpur, India, where he studied satyagraha, a form of nonviolence resistance developed by Mohandas Gandhi and his followers.

[8] He returned to the United States in 1956, entering the Graduate School of Theology at Oberlin College in Ohio.

One of his Oberlin professors introduced him to Martin Luther King Jr. who had also embraced Gandhi's principles of nonviolent resistance.

He moved to Nashville, where he attended Vanderbilt University and began teaching nonviolent protest techniques.

[11] Lawson moved to Nashville, Tennessee, and enrolled at the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University, where he served as the southern director for CORE and began conducting nonviolence training workshops for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in a church basement in 1958.

While in Nashville, he met and mentored a number of young students at Vanderbilt, Fisk University, and other area schools in the tactics of nonviolent direct action.

[12] In Nashville, he trained many of the future leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, among them Diane Nash, James Bevel, Bernard Lafayette, Marion Barry, and John Lewis.

[13] In February 1960, following the lunch sit-ins by students at the Woolworth's stores in Greensboro, North Carolina, Lawson and several others were arrested.

Lawson took part in a well-publicized three-day Freedom Ride commemorative program sponsored by Vanderbilt University's Office of Active Citizenship and Service in January 2007.

Participants also included fellow Civil Rights activists Jim Zwerg, Diane Nash, Bernard Lafayette, C. T. Vivian and John Seigenthaler; journalists and approximately 180 students, faculty and administrators from Vanderbilt, Fisk, Tennessee State University and American Baptist College.

[23] He spearheaded California State University Northridge's (CSUN) Civil Discourse and Social Change initiative as a visiting faculty member for the academic year of 2010/11, where he continued to serve as a visiting scholar teaching a semester-long course on nonviolence until his death in 2024.

[24][25] The initiative built on CSUN's history of activism and diversity, while focusing on the current budget and policy battles surrounding education.

[26] The International Center on Nonviolent Conflict held an eight-day program on civil resistance facilitated by Lawson in Nashville in 2013 and 2014.

[27] A class taught by Lawson, Kent Wong, Kelly Lytle Hernandez, and Ana Luz Gonzalez inspired UCLA students to publish Nonviolence and Social Movements, a book that focuses on the principles of nonviolence and social change that Lawson taught.

Lawson delivered the keynote address to the public at Portland State University, beginning five days of the 6th James Lawson Institute, organized by peace scholar and former SNCC Communications Co-Director (with Julian Bond) Mary E. King.

[34][35] A one-mile stretch (1.6 km) of Adams Boulevard near Holman United Methodist Church was renamed in his honor in 2024.