Join the Aquarium of the Pacific as it hosts its eleventh annual African-American Festival, celebrating the rich diversity of African-American and African cultures. The weekend will feature live entertainment, arts and crafts, ethnic food, and more. Festival performers include Mardi Gras second line dancers, hip hop and break dancers, tap dancers, jazz musicians, interactive drum circles, West African dancers, and storytellers.

Heritage Award
Rev. James Lawson

A third-generation Methodist minister, pioneer in the civil rights movement in the United States, and proponent of nonviolent action, Rev. James M. Lawson, Jr. is the Heritage Award honoree at the Aquarium of the Pacific’s 2013 African-American Festival. Lawson learned about principles of nonviolence through the Fellowship of Reconciliation and during three years spent in India. When the two met at the Oberlin School of Theology, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. urged Lawson to come to the South and take an active role in the national civil rights movement. Lawson moved to Nashville and began teaching workshops in nonviolent direct action. Dr. King called Lawson “the greatest teacher of nonviolence in America.” Throughout the 1960s Lawson was active in the civil rights movement in Memphis and in Nashville, where he was a Freedom Rider. Lawson served as pastor for twenty-five years at the Holman Methodist Church in Los Angeles. He has continued to work on behalf of social justice causes, from labor and union issues to immigrant rights and international peace.