Join Peace House and Ashland’s Peace Church (UCC) March 7 in welcoming George Lakey to Ashland. George is a veteran nonviolent activist, trainer, and author. He will be reading and sharing stories from his new book, “Dancing with History: a life for peace and justice.” George will be speaking at 2 p.m. at Peace House and at 7 p.m. at UCC (717 Siskiyou Blvd.) in Ashland.
George Lakey’s first arrest was for a sit-in during a civil rights campaign in 1963, while he was studying at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously he’d been active in demonstrations with the Congress of Racial Equality. With Martin Oppenheimer he wrote A Manual for Direct Action (1964) for the civil rights movement. The daughter of Martin Luther King, Rev. Dr. Bernice A. King, later described that book as “literally a lifesaver for many during the height of the struggle for black freedom and dignity.”
In 1964 he joined the training staff for Mississippi Fre
edom Summer, in which nearly a thousand students from the North went to Mississippi to lead Freedom Schools and do voter registration. After helping design an activist curriculum with civil rights leaders Bayard Rustin, James Farmer and others, he taught at the Martin Luther King, Jr., School of Social Change, assisting young civil rights workers from the front lines to develop further their leadership skills.
After taking advanced studies in sociology at Penn, Lakey wrote a series of articles and books on the theory and strategy of nonviolent struggle. He taught at Haverford College and the University of Pennsylvania. In 1990 he co-founded Training for Change. He has led over 1500 workshops on five continents, including work with the African National Congress and in the civil rights movements of Zimbabwe, Taiwan, and Myanmar.
He has also been an activist in other social movements in the U.S.: anti-Vietnam war, gay liberation, Men Against Patriarchy, Jobs with Peace (a labor coalition), and climate justice.
“Peace Educator of the Year, 2010”
In 2006 Swarthmore College invited him to become Eugene M. Lang Visiting Professor for Issues in Social Change, where he created an on-line database of over 1000 cases of nonviolent campaigns in nearly 200 countries, including dozens of campaigns from the classic period of the U.S. civil rights movement, 1955-68. Swarthmore will be using his memoir as a course-assigned book.
He has lectured at Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, Thailand’s Thommasat University, and many other colleges and universities, including as a popular speaker for the annual day remembering Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
