Friday, February 20, 2026 • 6:00 PM
The National Civil Rights Museum

The Memphis book launch for Nonviolent will be a celebration and remembrance of Rev. Lawson’s role in the Civil Rights Movement, featuring his son John Lawson and co-author Emily Yellin. The children of many of Rev. Lawson’s colleagues in the Memphis movement will also be in attendance, including sons and daughters of some of the Memphis sanitation workers who went on strike in 1968. These were the men that Dr. King was in town supporting when he was killed. Rev. Lawson was the head of the strategy committee for the strike and left a rich legacy in the fight for racial and economic justice from his twelve years as a pastor in Memphis.

The moderator for the evening, Carol Jenkins, former anchor of WNBC-TV News in New York City has a civil rights legacy of her own. She is the niece of A.G. Gaston, one of the most prominent Black businessman of the twentieth century who owned the famed Gaston Motel, the headquarters of the Birmingham campaign led by Dr. King, Ralph Abernathy, Andrew Young, and Rev. Lawson and others civil rights luminaries. She was born in Lowndes County, Alabama on a family farm that was a stop on the historic Selma to Montgomery march in 1965.

Local musicians will sing and play songs from the movement during the program and at the reception and book signing that will follow it, with a chance for attendees to see the exhibit about Bayard Rustin’s legacy in the museum gallery. Rustin was a mentor to Rev. Lawson, the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, and an organizer with Rev. Lawson of the major march in Memphis which Coretta King led a few days after Dr. King’s death in 1968.