Remembering Rev. Bill Lawson, Civil Rights Icon and “Pastor of Houston”

The Rev. William Lawson, a beloved preacher and community leader known as the “Pastor of Houston” who led efforts to desegregate the city, died Tuesday at the age of 95. Lawson was judicious in the fight for social justice, his cautious approach evident from the start. . One spring evening in 1960, on the campus of Texas Southern University, Lawson — then a lanky 31-year-old who had arrived in Texas five years earlier — invited a handful of students from the Progressive Youth Association, which was dedicated to making advancing desegregation in Houston, in the den of the Baptist Student Union, of which he was director. The group’s leader, a dynamic TSU law student and Army veteran named Eldrewey Stearns, had gained some notoriety on campus after speaking to the city council about a police beating he had recently suffered. The city needed to change, Stearns said. He needed to address his racism.

Students had seen a path for action when they read about protesters at North Carolina universities who closed lunch counters. Now they asked Lawson: Could they do the same thing at the nearby Weingarten lunch counter? No one at that time had organized a sit-in west of the Mississippi River, but regardless of precedent, Lawson was reluctant to incite students to action.

His father had a third-grade education; his mother had graduated from high school. His parents had sacrificed to send their son to college. He did not take this opportunity lightly for himself, nor for the students on the TSU campus. The protest could end in arrest, upending their futures and destroying the dreams they were working toward.

But of course, Lawson also understood the students’ frustration. As a relatively new Kansas City resident to Houston—he had arrived on August 28, 1955, the same day that fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was lynched by a mob in Mississippi—the Midwesterner was surprised by the manifest segregation to which he was subjected. see in the Jim Crow South: the separate water fountains, the separate seating arrangements.

So, even if it hardly made the students frothed, it did not discourage them either. “They left and left me saying, ‘Whatever you think about whether it’s right, we’re going to protest,'” the reverend told me in 2015. “And that’s what they got do.”

Lawson stayed in touch with the students and when they were arrested, he fought to get them out of prison. After that, he said, “I kind of got drawn into the civil rights movement. »

It was the beginning of a long career in civil rights. When Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Houston in 1963, despite J. Edgar Hoover describing him as a dangerous communist, it was Lawson’s new church, Wheeler Avenue Baptist, that overcame the slander and gave the pulpit to the visiting leader. When the Houston NAACP called for protests against school segregation, it was Lawson who gathered students to march to Houston ISD headquarters – just one of the marches he participated in.

Because he was seen as a reasonable person looking for peaceful solutions, protesters were not the only ones who looked to him for advice. Municipal authorities also did so. Lawson was in the room when business leaders discussed Houston’s economic future and decided to remove all “white” and “colored” signs, thus quietly ending Jim Crow in the city in 1960.

Years later, when he was arrested for protesting after a boy drowned in a municipal landfill in a predominantly black neighborhood, Mayor Louie Welch called Lawson’s home and asked his wife, Audrey: “Where is Reverend Lawson?” She replied: “In your prison. »

Welch picked up the reverend and brought him to TSU, where students were in conflict with police. The police began shooting before he had a chance to intervene, and the night ended with one officer dead, almost certainly killed by a ricocheted police bullet, and nearly five hundred arrests. students.