Reverend Lawson was imprisoned in 1952 when he refused to register for the armed forces. When he was released, he traveled to India where he closely studied Gandhi's use of nonviolence for social change. In 1957, shortly after Lawson’s return Martin Luther King, Jr. visited Vanderbilt University where the two met and became not only colleagues but friends. During this encounter Dr. King asked Lawson to come to the South to help organize and train activists in nonviolent resistance. Lawson dropped out of graduate school and moved to Nashville working under the Fellowship of Reconciliation Southern chapter. From January to May in 1958 Lawson held nonviolence workshops in Little Rock, a year after the Little Rock Nine desegregation of the local high schools. Later, he and Dr. King launched a nonviolent campaign in Nashville from 1959 to 1962. 

From 1957 to 1969, Lawson was involved with the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), a pacifist organization founded in Europe at the outbreak of WWI and the oldest pacifist organization in the U.S. He served as a Southern Director of FOR and began organizing workshops on nonviolence for community members & students at Vanderbilt and the city’s four black colleges (Tennessee State University, Fisk University, Meharry College, and American Baptist College). He then enrolled at Vanderbilt University Divinity School in Nashville. His time with the Fellowship of Reconciliation helped him recognize that as a disciple of Jesus he was a nonviolent practitioner, not a pacifist.

In 1959, Lawson alongside Diane Nash, Marion Barry, John Lewis, Bernard Lafayette, & James Bevel planned nonviolent demonstrations in Nashville & conducted test sit-ins. These organizers were met with resistance and were considered “radical” in Nashville as the belief at the time was that Nashville was a “moderate” city with “the best working relationships with Black people and that in fact the sit-in was not the way to do it.”

On February 1, 1960, a year prior to the Freedom Rides, the first of the lunch counter sit-ins was organized in Greensboro, North Carolina at Woolworth’s diner. The sit-in began with North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University (NCAT) students Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, and David Richmond, who trained with Reverend Lawson’s principles in nonviolence. These activist students learned how to use one's body in the occupation of space. The students purchased items and sat down at the Woolworth's lunch counter, they were asked to leave but politely refused and to their surprise, were not arrested. They remained seated until the store closed. As the days followed, more students joined the action. By February 4th, more than 300 people showed up for the sit-ins. The sit-ins followed in Kress, a five and dime store in Greensboro, and remained peaceful and polite.

Following the lunch counter sit-ins in Greensboro, Lawson and other activists launched similar protests in downtown Nashville which became the largest and most influential of the Southern student sit-in campaigns. More than 150 students were arrested before the city began desegregating lunch counters. The first sit-in in Nashville was on February 13th 1960. The city of Nashville officially desegregated its downtown lunch counters in May of 1960. In July of 1960, the Woolworth's in Greensboro, NC began serving  all customers. This action was mirrored across transportation, libraries, and other public facilities across the South.

The imagery in the mural comes from Paul Von Blum's statements about his experiences in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and the lunch counter sit-ins. Blum remembers that the level of restraint they had practiced in training for the sit-ins served them when hot coffee was poured on these young activists while being verbally ridiculed and taunted.