Kirkus: An expansive, inspiring autobiography by a crucial figure in the Civil Rights Movement.

Starred Review

This wonderful book is a powerful reminder that moral clarity can improve the world. As a boy, Lawson had a “transcendent” experience: “a voice beyond myself” forbid him from responding to racist taunts with violence. Thus began his lifelong commitment to nonviolence, which guided his work as an adviser to Martin Luther King Jr. and an organizer of sit-ins, strikes, and marches that helped to overturn discriminatory laws. A Methodist pastor who died in 2024, his self-portrait is eventful yet modest. In his 20s, during a 13-month prison term for refusing to register for the military draft, he refined his views on challenging “evil social patterns,” as he wrote in a 1951 journal entry. Foreign travel was also instructive. In India, he studied Gandhi’s teachings on nonviolence, which informed one of Lawson’s civil disobedience strategies—“flooding the jails” with righteous protesters. Lawson ended his pastoral career in California, pushing for fairness in schools and the workplace, but his public life would be “defined” by his 1960s civil rights work in the South. Faced with church burnings, daily assaults, and assassinations of numerous allies, some in the movement edged toward “revolutionary violence.”

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