The Back Story

First grade and documenting the movement

The Lawsons and the Yellins have been closely connected for more than sixty years. In 1968, Emily Yellin and John Lawson were in the same first grade class at Memphis State Campus School during the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike, while their parents were becoming friends fighting alongside each other for the rights of the striking workers and for racial justice. In the month after Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, Emily's parents — who were both journalists — began documenting the strike and its aftermath. They did in-depth interviews with people from all sides, including and especially Rev. Lawson. Emily's father interviewed Rev. Lawson eleven times between 1968 and 1972. Transcripts from those interviews were used in the writing of this book. In fact, there are sentences and paragraphs in the book that are partly based on interviews with David Yellin and partly based on interviews with Emily fifty years later.

Rodney King and James Earl Ray

Twenty-four years later, Emily was a young journalist living in L.A. during the 1992 uprising in reaction to the acquittals of the police officers who beat Rodney King, when she heard a familiar voice.

"I will never forget sitting in a parking lot in Marina del Rey during my lunch break from work and hearing Rev. Lawson on KCRW radio the day after the most intense looting and burning in the city. He compared that moment to the day after Dr. King’s assassination in Memphis. I had not heard his voice for years, but I felt he was talking directly to me."

Then in 1996, Emily had moved back to Memphis and was covering the South for The New York Times, when James Earl Ray was trying to get a new trial. She found herself reporting on the entire effort by the King family, Ray’s lawyers, and Rev. Lawson from 1996 through 1999, and even covering the story about Ray’s 1998 funeral in Nashville, which Rev. Lawson officiated.

1,300 Men

In 2017 , their paths crossed again, when Emily founded a nonprofit journalism project called Striking Voices and produced a ten-part video series about the lives of the 1968 Memphis sanitation strikers and their families. She and her team interviewed thirty people for the project -- surviving strikers, and strikers wives and children. She also interviewed Rev. Lawson to tell his story as head of the strategy committee of the strike and to help put the entire event in historical perspective. Emily's parents had passed on by then. But both she and Rev. Lawson were keenly aware of the legacy they were continuing together of documenting the movement that Rev. Lawson had helped shape as he continued to pursue the goals of justice and human rights for the rest of his life.

The Book

Three years later, Rev. Lawson told Emily that his wife Dorothy had always told him he should write his story. Emily offered to work with him on it.

"One day, in the summer of 2020, I called Rev. Lawson and asked him if he was interested in publishing a memoir of his life. He agreed, to my great delight. We decided to have regular phone interviews a few days a week, every week, for as long as it took. Neither of us understood just how long that would be."

From September of 2020 to May of 2024, they spoke for hours almost every week on the phone, from Los Angeles to Memphis, and in person at Holman United Methodist Church in Los Angeles. Rev. Lawson recounted his life, and more than eighty years of activism, with remarkable clarity.

"I am deeply indebted to Rev. Lawson for giving me the honor of those sessions and the chance to help write about his amazing life. And I am especially grateful to his entire family, for always welcoming me in and supporting this major endeavor. I have known the Lawsons just about my whole life.

"Writing this book with Rev. Lawson has felt like something I was always meant to do. Rev. Lawson called it providential that we were working together. I joked it was a secular parable teaching everyone to be nice to all your kid’s friends, and your friends’ kids, because you never know which one will help you write your memoir one day. This book was born of love on both of our parts, and a shared conviction to liberty and justice for all."

While Rev. James Lawson Jr. passed away on June 9, 2024, the spirit of the book and their work together endured until his very last days.

"The last thing Rev. Lawson said to me in May 2024 when I visited him in the hospital two weeks before he died was, “Emily, you have had a very unique role in my family’s life.” The last thing I said to him was, “I love you.”