George Lakey

In the late 1950s, Lakey was active in the ban-the-bomb movement,[6] then participated in the civil rights movement, in 1963 being arrested in a sit-in.[3] The following year he was a trainer for Mississippi Freedom Summer and co-authored his first book, A Manual for Direct Action, which was widely used in the South by the civil rights movement.[7] In 1966 he co-founded the national body A Quaker Action Group (AQAG), whose activities took him in 1967 to Vietnam to participate in the sailing ship Phoenix's protest action in South Vietnam seeking to give medical supplies to the anti-war Buddhist movement there.[8]

In 1970, Lakey was active within AQAG in the successful direct action in the Puerto Rican struggle to stop the U.S. Navy from using the island of Culebra for target practice.[9] In 1971 he helped found Movement for a New Society (MNS), a network of autonomous groups working for a nonviolent revolution.[10] The network featured living collectives and co-ops as well as participation in national movements of the 1970s and '80s. The network's training program at the Philadelphia Life Center Association became highly influential in the US and abroad in spreading Paulo Freire's Popular education and other participatory training methods.[11]

During the 1970s, he also gave national leadership to the Campaign to Stop the B-1 Bomber and Promote Peace Conversion,[12] which succeeded in persuading Congress and President Carter to de-fund this Air Force program.[13] In 1976 he co-organized Men Against Patriarchy, a pioneering anti-sexism movement for men. In 1982 he organized the Pennsylvania section of a national labor/community coalition named "Jobs with Peace" and directed that effort for seven years.[14]

In 1973, Lakey came out in public as a gay man, and joined the LGBT movement, becoming part of what he later would call "Gay Liberation's early visionary days."[15][16]

In 1991, he co-founded with Philadelphia activist Barbara Smith, Training for Change (TfC). Building on previous training at the Martin Luther King Jr. School for Social Change and Movement for a New Society, Training for Change developed a new pedagogy called "Direct Education". Training for Change did trainings and consultations for activists and nongovernmental organizations in 20 countries.[17]

In 2009, Lakey co-founded Earth Quaker Action Team (EQAT), to build a just and sustainable economy through nonviolent direct action campaigns. The group won its first campaign, forcing PNC Bank to stop financing mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia. In that campaign, while in his seventies, Lakey was arrested and also led a 200-mile march.[18]

Lakey's first teaching post in higher education was in the Martin Luther King Jr. School of Social Change, a division of Crozer Theological Seminary in Chester, Pennsylvania.[19] Lakey helped formulate the curriculum and then taught there for its first four years, 1965–1969.[20] In this period he systematized the field of "Experiential Nonviolence Training" and the students were supported in efforts to connect field training with theory in direct actions.[21]

He joined the Peace Studies program at the University of Pennsylvania, successfully expanding its undergraduate offerings and the participation of minority students. In addition, he helped lead a University of Pennsylvania group dynamics lab promoting innovative feminist leadership. He also taught peace studies at Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania.

He later taught at Temple University and much later he accepted the endowed Eugene M. Lang Visiting Professorship in Issues of Social Change at Swarthmore College. He continued at Swarthmore College in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania as a Lang Professor and then as a research professor until his retirement.

In 2010, Lakey was named by the National Peace and Justice Studies Association as "Peace Educator of the Year".