Civil rights leader the Rev. Jim Lawson will be speaking on the Civil Rights Act of 1964 at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 9, in Foster Auditorium, 102 Paterno Library.

A supporter of the Gandhian philosophy of nonviolent protest, Lawson was one of the Civil Rights Movement’s leading theoreticians and tacticians in the African-American struggle for freedom and equality in the 1950s and 1960s.

From right to left, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the Rev. James M. Lawson Jr. and others met in 1968 during the sanitation workers strike in Memphis. Image: Submitted photo

Rev. Lawson helped coordinate the Freedom Rides in 1961 and the Meredith March in 1966, and while working as a pastor at the Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis, played a major role in the sanitation workers strike of 1968. On the eve of his assassination, Martin Luther King called Lawson “the leading theorist and strategist of nonviolence in the world.”

The event is free and open to the public. Sponsors are the George and Ann Richards Civil War Era Center, the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) We The People Challenge Grant, Rock Ethics Institute, Africana Research Center and Penn State’s University Libraries. For questions or requests for any type of accommodation, contact the Richards Center at 814-863-0151 or RCWEC@psu.edu by email.