The Rev. James M. Lawson Jr. will deliver Cornell University's second Martin Luther King Jr. lecture this month at 4:30 p.m. in Sage Chapel on Thursday, Feb 22. Lawson's talk is titled "Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?" It is free and open to the public.

Lawson was a close friend and colleague of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and a key thinker in non-violent social strategies, said Robert Johnson, director of Cornell United Religious Work, which is sponsoring the talk.

Lawson is an ordained minister in the United Methodist Church and is considered by many prominent civil rights scholars and advocates to be the architect of the Civil Rights Movement's nonviolent direct action strategy forged under his and King's leadership.

U.S. Congressman John Lewis, the guest speaker for last year's Martin Luther King Jr. lecture at Cornell, paid tribute to Lawson in his book Walking With the Wind , and he described Lawson's efforts in the 1960s as training for "a nonviolent struggle that would force this country to face its conscience. Lawson was arming us, preparing us, and planting in us a sense of both rightness and righteousness. A soul force that would see us through the ugliness and pain that lay ahead, all in pursuit of what he and Dr. King called, 'The Beloved Community.'"

During the 1960s Lawson was a field secretary for the Fellowship of Reconciliation and is now chair of that organization; he also served as senior pastor at Centenary Methodist Church in Memphis when he invited King to come to that city to support the garbage workers' strike. Lawson has recently been involved in trying to remove U.S. sanctions against Iraq and is currently visiting Harvard University, where he is giving the Luce Lectures.

Among his other academic works, he has served as Regent Lecturer at the University of California at Riverside, the Brooks Professor in Religion at the University of Southern California and adjunct professor at the School of Theology at Claremont. He continues to teach at the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolence in Los Angeles and he hosts a national cable television program that examines current affairs.