The Rev. James Lawson turned a ceremony to unveil his portrait into a call to work for justice and peace for the friends, colleagues and admirers who gathered to honor him.

“Don’t live in the world as if you were renting or act as if you are only here for the summer,” he said, paraphrasing the Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet. “Live and act as if you live in your father’s house.”

Lawson, briefly expelled from Vanderbilt in 1960 as a divinity school student for his work helping to desegregate lunch counters in downtown Nashville, returned in 2006 to teach. The portrait ceremony recognized the 50th anniversary of his arrival at Vanderbilt in 1958.

“I hope that this signifies not only a time of change for me and my recommitment to go on for as long as I have life and breath,” Lawson said. “I believe very firmly in the values that the movement of non-violence in this country helped to launch – passion and truth and beauty and wonder and the realization that us human beings don’t take enough care of ourselves. … We can move from the old cruelties and tortures of life to … the loving community.”

The portrait was created by Washington, D.C.-artist Simmie Knox, who painted the official White House portrait of President Bill Clinton. It shows a present-day Lawson.

“I think that what he has come up with can never capture the depth and true beauty and peace that Jim conveys to all of us every day in his work and in his deeds and in his teaching,” said Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos. “But it is a beautiful, beautiful painting of a beautiful, beautiful person who has been such an important part of our university.”

Dubbed by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as “the leading nonviolence theorist in the world,” Lawson studied the Gandhian movement in India before becoming a leader in the civil rights movement. He also had a long career as a United Methodist minister.

Knox, formerly an abstract artist, has specialized in portraiture since 1981. He has been commissioned to paint the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., writer Alex Haley, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, comedian Bill Cosby, boxer Muhammad Ali and many others. He did not attend the unveiling.

Contact: Jim Patterson, (615) 322-NEWS
jim.patterson@vanderbilt.edu