The relationship of veteran reporter Emily Yellin with civil rights leader the Rev. James Lawson began when Yellin was 5 years old.
“His son John and I went to elementary school together for six years in Memphis,” Yellin said. “There was a familiarity and trust that was really important.”
Yellin co-wrote most of “Nonviolent: A Memoir of Resistance, Agitation and Love” with Lawson, but had to finish it on her own after his death in 2024.
“When he did pass away, and I needed John’s guidance, or his other sons’ guidance, they were there and we already had a relationship,” she said. “It would have been harder had that not been the case.”
Yellin’s parents did not bring her up in a faith, but they were close friends with the Rev. Lawson and his wife, Dorothy Lawson. Yellin’s parents also worked in the Civil Rights Movement.
“Mrs. Lawson and my mother in 1965 were part of a group in Memphis called the Saturday Lunch Club,” Yellin said. “They would simply go to lunch together at prominent places around Memphis. … It was now legal for Black and white people to dine together, and they were testing it.”
Yellin has had a long and distinguished journalism career. She previously interviewed Lawson on a multimedia project called Striking Voices, where Memphis sanitation workers who went on strike in 1968 were extensively interviewed, along with their family members. It was during this strike that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968.
Yellin has frequently been published in The New York Times and also written for Time, The Washington Post, the International Herald Tribune, Newsweek and Smithsonian magazine. “Nonviolent” is her third book.
Does it make sense that a white woman collaborated with Lawson rather than a Black scholar?
“I brought that up,” Yellin said. “No one in the family felt (opposed to it). John brought back the idea to the family, and everybody said yes. But the big, the important voice was his mother, and Mrs. Lawson immediately said yes.”
Patterson is a reporter for UM News. Contact him at (615) 742-5470 or newsdesk@umcom.org. To read more United Methodist news, subscribe to the free UM News Digest.
