Dear Rev. Lawson,
Thank you, for teaching me how to march, how to fight and how to have faith. How to find the spark and fan it. The difference that is made in choosing the relentless force of the soul as a way of life rather than a tactic. Thank you.
May I and all your students as we slowly but surely find one another through our grief and love and put all the stories together, honor you. By being teachers. I know words will neve be enough, but I have to try. You always saw me in my “have to try.” That’s where I was when I met you.
I watched you, for years, introduce yourself as “a Methodist minister from Massillon, Ohio” and I watched what I think was a twinkle of amusement in your eye when people kept waiting for you to continue. But that was who you were, and to know you was to observe that twinkle often.
“To know you” is a greater gift than I think I ever even realized. I will thank your family, personally, the next opportunity I have, for sharing you with us. What a sharing it must have been. With as much time as you spent with us, with me, it cannot have been easy. Thank you, also, for sharing your family with us, with me, by welcoming us, me, into it. “D. J.! You are in my heart and in my family!” is how you began your note to me in the copy of the Children you handed me one day after one of those many, many Saturday morning group meetings.
It was not the same book I asked you to sign the first time I met you, Walking With the Wind, John Lewis memoir, which I clutched to my chest as I hurtled through the courtyard to meet my destiny for the first time back in 2007. I was 19, and Walking had become my Bible overnight, as I had also become, without realizing it, baptized into a movement that I’d find myself leading soon enough, ending up even more like you than I could have tried. And try I did, to the amusement of many, as I was often the youngest in the room, for many years when Nashville’s currently thriving Black youth-led movement was still a memory of the ‘90s and a dream of the new millennium. It turned out to be my dream. Following you helped me realize it, or at least what I could of it. I resolved to never be the youngest or alone ever again. There were too many around me who didn’t need a reason to be radicalized, to take up their own freedom in their hearts and hands and fight for it. They just needed an invitation. I learned that from you. No one needs to be educated on their own oppression. We are all just an invitation away from doing something about it.
And do something we did. Even though I graduated from Fisk university in May of 2010, I felt my real graduation was April 19, 2010, or ‘Aprilteenth’ as Rev. Ed Sanders coined it. It was a nonviolent, silent march through the streets of Nashville, led by two of my heroes — you and Diane Nash — commemorating and taking the same route as the march protesting the bombing of Z. Alexander Looby’s house. It was also the first time anyone — you — gave me the assignment of marshal. My people’s trust in that musty little orange day-glo vest was worth a thousand diplomas to me that day. Your trust in me, the trust of the rest of the group changed me forever. Your trust in a lot of people has changed the world forever. And the best part is, you showed us how to keep that powerful transference going. So that it will indeed, continue forever, beyond each of us, beyond our memory and those who will remember us. My name never needs to enter a history book because I know that my work will. You modeled that, continuing your work, your ministry, your organizing well beyond the vaguely ‘70s drop off point of most memorials of civil rights legends. Your legacy will absolutely continue on beyond even that. I and countless other classmates of mine who share this sacred cohort that has pooled around your feet — across the globe — will make sure of it. We already have.
In 2011, you counseled me through the Occupy movement and what I thought was a contradictory tension between my commitment to the encampment and larger movement, and my commitments as a student at Vanderbilt Divinity school (my first and only choice for graduate school … because that’s where you went. Being in the same town as the footsteps of one’s hero makes walking in them whenever possible convenient. and it’s worked out wonderfully.) You pointed out to me, in our own shared theological language that you knew even the fire of my youth couldn’t argue with. You got through to me and showed me that there is no separation. If God’s love followed me wherever I go, then there can be no separation. The walls between movement, academy, street and community began to fall down in my mind. And I began to organize accordingly.
That’s partly why in 2014, my first full time organizing job was at the Tennessee Immigrant & Refugee Rights Coalition (TIRRC). To my knowledge, the most recent immigrant ancestry I have was about three to five centuries ago and I have a hunch it wasn’t consensual. I’m Black Southern trans minister — I really wasn’t the best fit as TIRRC’s Youth organizer. But I had learned about Dreamers from you, Jim, and not very long after, met a few in my early organizing trainings and saw, like you did, in their fight, a spark that regardless of my skin color, I had in me lessons and trainings to add to it like kindling, if they’d have me. And I was just in time for the massive shifts that rolled through the lives and work of the young Dreamers whose work I supported. Recently, someone mentioned that there are folks out there who actually credit you with inspiring some portion of the Dream Act. I didn’t know this, but I’m not surprised. At the time, all I knew was I could flank and support these young folks and their community with my solidarity — and what you taught me.
I also thought of you and what you taught me a little later that same year when I noticed students from Meharry and Students from TSU going to Ferguson, but separately. Following what you taught me, I just talked to all of them, and realized they simply didn’t know each other. Yet. So I invited them to a meeting. The Saturday morning group didn’t meet as regularly then, but through Keith Caldwell I was able to get some space for an hour in the JUMP offices right next door, and I invited as many of the old Sat Am crew as I could. That was the beginning of the Black Lives Matter uprisings in Nashville, but for me, it was also confirmation of one of your cornerstone lessons on how to Save the Soul of a Nation. You don’t set out to do it because you see it should be done. There is a spark that must catch and light first, and you can’t provide that spark, you can’t start it manually and you can’t fabricate it or touch things off with the illusion of urgency and friction and activity. The spark will come, you just have to recognize it when it does.
I didn’t have long to wait, but it wasn’t the exit I expected. August came and with it the news of Mike Brown’s body, left in the street and sun. Now, my own community needed me. No, I needed my community. So on a cold November night, I leaned on a pole outside of the MNPD courthouse, at a vigil for Mike Brown on the night that the verdict came down. It had already done so, and along with it came so much of what I believed; I felt like that shared theology, that faith in God’s love and the certainty of an arch towards justice was just crashing down inside me. I was deep into my grief and rage when I heard the vigil ending. Keith, another member of the Saturday morning group, had been leading the vigil. I heard his voice singing out over the grieving, chilly crowd — “…and now, we’re gonna MARCH. We’re gonna march, we’re about to MARCH and D. J. IS GONNA LEAD US.”
I was already headed to my car to go home and weep alone some more when I stopped short, confused. “Keith, no, I—” “and D. J. is gonna LEAD US.” Keith made eye contact with me and I understood. For such a time as this. You didn’t train us for nothing, Jim. That was, at the time, one of the largest protests Nashville had ever seen. I led more people than I had time or brain cells available to count that night, with no plan. No coordination. Just my grief, my courage, the trust of my friends and people, and every last thing you taught me. To my knowledge, we managed to make it home safely that night — no thanks to the petty-ass cops handing out hot chocolate. You warned us of such antics too, which is why I snatched the first cup I saw and bellowed into the megaphone that as long as Nashville stayed one bullet away from a hashtag that the hot chocolate they were handing out was boiled in blood as far as I was concerned.
You gave me some of the most chilling, and valuable, advice of my life around this time. During the Saturday morning group meetings, you would look or gesture towards me sometimes, in that deep sonorous voice of yours, emanating out from that frosty white-maned head that so often reminded me of an elder, mystic lion. “D. J., your generation of activists will have an even tougher fight against racism and plantation capitalism than we did in our day. During the sit-ins, we could point to the White’s Only sign on the door to prove racism still exists. In your time, the signs have come down, yet the problem still persists.” But deep in the winter in 2014, as the backlash and violence began to rear its ugly head nationwide, I realized that the lives of me and all my friends were in danger. Recalling the story of Diane Nash informing Robert Kennedy that the Freedom Rides would continue even after the bus bombing “we’ve already written our wills, sir.” You gave me that copy of the Children for a reason.
I called you, late at night grateful for the time difference now that you were back home in California. I tried really hard not to cry. But I was afraid. The state legislature of Tennessee was working to make it legal for people to hit me and my friends with their cars if we blocked the streets just like some of your students did, as if they forgot that.
What could we do, how would I protect people? This fight was only beginning and already I felt like I was possibly leading all of these young brave and brilliant black folks into the jaw of a violent and fearful nation. “All we said was ‘stop killing us’ Jim, and now it’s like it’s open season on us.”
“Well, D. J.,” that slow, deep, rich voice rolled to me out of the dark, “I believe that the level of fear and anger and vitriol that you face from white people now is unlike anything I ever saw in the 1960s. I cannot, honestly, tell you what to do, think or expect.” Damn. The floor fell out from under me then. I don’t tell people this part that often. That Rev. Dr. James Lawson, who survived the Civil Rights movement, still hadn’t seen this level of hate — floored me. But, here I was. That was 10 years ago.
That hatred that shocked us both has only seemed to grow since. But so has the movement. In 2020, one of the few protests I did attend was to flank and support a group of extremely brave and brilliant teenagers when they led what is now the largest protest that Nashville had ever seen, and the past four years have shown there is still plenty to fight against and for. But as I was taught, we are all just an invitation away from doing something about it.
D. J. Hudson is a local activist who began organizing in Nashville while a student at Fisk University and Vanderbilt University. They’ve since returned home to Georgia and currently serve on the board of Southerners On New Ground (SONG).