Dancing with History: A Life for Peace and Justice. By GeorgeLakey. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2022

During the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, George Lakey took a stand. Moved to action by the looming prospect of nuclear war, Lakey, then a graduate student in sociology, climbed upon a low wall by the student union building at the University of Pennsylvania and gave a soap box speech. He quickly found himself facilitating an impromptu town meeting. After several hours of lively discussion, others took the lead while George stepped down. His spontaneous action spoke to the moment and set a pattern for his lifelong commitment to nonviolent action for constructive social change. Raised by devout Methodists in a small town in eastern Pennsylvania, Lakey's memoir Dancing with History: A Life for Peace and Justice describes his passage from working-class youth to Quaker social justice activist. He provides a rich and readable account of his more than six decades of activist engagement for civil rights, nuclear disarmament, peace in Vietnam, queer liberation, environmental justice, and a wide range of related issues. Lakey recounts the many mentors who shaped his thinking, the colleagues with whom he worked, the campaigns he helped to lead, as well as recalling the joys and burdens of family life, communal living, and coming out as a bisexual man. As with the memoirs of Lakey's activist contemporaries, such as David Hartsough, Brad Lyttle, and Jim Forest, who also devoted themselves to experimenting with the power of nonviolent direct action, Dancing with History provides a deeply personal yet historically grounded account of the many vines of activism with roots in the 1960s. Throughout his unique sojourn, Lakey has maintained an optimistic vision of making practical change through the power of democratic organizing and nonviolent action. Lakey cites his upbringing as starting him on his life's course. Hard work, family, and faith provided the foundations for him to begin his quest for a more peaceful world. He left home to enroll in West Chester State College, where he discovered Quakerism and ran afoul of the administration for his activism. He finished his undergraduate work at Cheney State Teachers College, the oldest historically black institution of higher education in the United States, as the only white male living on campus. During his college years, Lakey met Berit Mathieson, a Norwegian student who became his spouse. Together they became members of the Society of Friends and activist parents, adopting two children and having one of their own. The Lakeys spent time in Berit's native Norway, which exposed George to the advantages of Scandinavian social democracy. Lakey profiles several individuals as influential mentors and colleagues. He credits Ray and Cynthia Arvio for introducing him to Quakerism. Lakey first met Lillian Willoughby while picketing in support of the voyage of the Golden Rule, a sailing ship that attempted to deter atmospheric atomic bomb tests in the Pacific Ocean, during the time her husband George served as a crewmember. The Willoughbys became long-term allies. He worked with Charlie Walker, a fellow Quaker organizer for peace and civil rights. Gene Sharp and Johan Galtung provided Lakey with the academic grounding needed for his quest to apply nonviolence to social change. Lakey emphasizes his relationship with Lawrence [Larry] Scott, who shared a passion for the strategic application of Gandhian nonviolence. Scott's experience working with many peace organizations prompted him to emphasize achievable short-range goals to achieve long-term change, a strategic choice Lakey has also tried to implement in his activism. (For more information about Scott, see my essay, “Experiment in Persuasion: The Vigil against Biological Warfare at Fort Detrick, 1959–1961, and Antiwar Protest in the 1960s,” in the edited collection, Mid-Maryland History: Conflict, Growth and Change [2008].) Scott's insistence on developing constructive programs in the context of the “ecology of movements” found reinforcement when Lakey queried Bob Moses about the racially integrated Freedom Summer strategy of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Moses provided insight that helped George understand that “Identity politics is too simplistic in its moralism to support this level of strategic thinking” (107). Lakey's alliance with Scott deepened through their work in A Quaker Action Group (AQAG). George signed on as a crew member for the Phoenix, a sailboat that AQAG used in 1967 to dramatize their delivery of medical relief supplies to North and South Vietnam. The floating protest garnered a welcome from North Vietnam and a more hostile greeting from US forces in the South. Lakey had been so outspoken in his opposition to the US invasion of Vietnam that, when Friend Norman Morrison immolated himself beneath Robert McNamara's Pentagon window in November 1965, people called to see if it had been George because Morrison went unnamed in the initial media reports. Through his work with AQAG, Lakey had the opportunity to build relationships with many of the era's most devoted nonviolent direct actionists. By 1971 the work of AQAG transformed into the more ambitious Movement for a New Society (MNS). Grounded in West Philadelphia, at its peak in the late 1970s MNS encompassed 16 homes involving over 100 people linked with other communities in a national network. The holistic MNS approach to nonviolent revolution entailed an exhausting amount of labor. MNS took on many issues, and George devoted himself to the campaign against building the B-1 bomber, which Jimmy Carter canceled but Ronald Reagan revived. Meanwhile, MNS contributed to the work of the Clamshell Alliance in opposition to the construction of the Seabrook nuclear power plant in New Hampshire. The Clamshell protest limited Seabrook to one reactor and prepared the ground for opposition to nuclear power that, combined with the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island, constrained the development of the US nuclear power industry and helped initiate the networks of nonviolence trainers that continue to develop movements today. A few years later, Lakey's work with the Jobs with Peace Campaign engaged all his experience and talent. By calling for the reallocation of military spending toward increased social investment to create jobs, the Jobs with Peace effort met Lakey's litmus test for action joined with a constructive program. Building on the success of the Nuclear Freeze Campaign, the 1983 Philadelphia Jobs with Peace referendum brought together a coalition of labor, religious, community, and peace organizations, with Lakey and MNS providing significant leadership and support. That November, the Jobs With Peace referendum passed in the city with a 76% favorable vote. Lakey continued his work, persuading then-president of the Pennsylvania AFL-CIO, Julius Uehlein, to endorse Jobs With Peace, only to be undercut by Cold Warrior Lane Kirkland, national AFL-CIO boss, who vetoed Uehlein's endorsement. (For more on Lakey's work with MNS, see https://movementforanewsociety.org and for more on his work with Jobs With Peace, see https://archives.tricolib.brynmawr.edu/resources/scpc-cdg-a-jobs_with_peace). The youthful countercultural and political energies that had fueled the Movement for a New Society in the 1970s waned in the 1980s. By 1988 those who remained utilized the Quaker procedure of “laying down” the organization to gently disband MNS. The legacy of MNS lives on in the work of determined activists who continued a myriad of organizing projects and the New Society Publishers, now based in Canada, which publishes books on environmentally sustainable living. While the model of communal living and collective commitment to activism proved unsustainable beyond a decade and a half, MNS provided an essential example of the strengths and weaknesses of asking for so deep a commitment from its members. MNS practiced Re-evaluation Counseling, also known as co-counseling. Lakey found the method helpful, while critics have described it as a method of psychological control. As one component of a range of therapies, Lakey credits the practice, along with chemotherapy and community support, as part of the treatment that helped him to survive cancer in the late 1970s. At a later point, he would participate in large group awareness trainings with the Insight and Lifespring organizations. His inclusive holism indicates the melding of new religious and social movements that happened within MNS. Lakey's application of the maxim that the personal is political bolstered him during his most trying times. The two African American children he and Berit adopted required extra parenting as they became entangled in the drug culture of Philadelphia. Both overdosed at different times; their son Peter died, while their daughter Christina survived and became a social worker. Third child Ingrid Lakey became a prominent Quaker activist in Philadelphia and currently works with her father in the Quaker Earth Action Team opposing mountaintop removal strip-mining. After raising children together, George and Berit divorced in 1986 but maintained a lasting friendship and familial bond. Lakey's sharing of his identity as a bisexual man to the Friends General Conference gathering in 1974 proved to be a bold and divisive action that fostered awareness and acceptance of queer identities among Friends and activists. The persistence George Lakey has sustained throughout his decades of activism is rooted in family, faith, and community. Lakey is known internationally for his patient workshops and for leading by example. He has become a prolific activist-scholar, with books and publications including How We Win: A Guide to Nonviolent Direct Action Campaigning (2018) and Viking Economics: How the Scandinavians Got It Right – and How We Can, Too (2016), all joined by a vision of creative change. A unique and expanding part of his legacy is the Global Nonviolence Database maintained by Swarthmore College, at https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/, which gives free access to documented cases of nonviolent action worldwide. The 2020 documentary Quakers: The Quiet Revolutionaries, at and he is also the subject of a film currently in production by the George Lakey Film Project, at Lakey's contributions to the centuries-long record of Quaker activism; www.pbs.org/show/quakers-quiet-revolutionaries/, www.georgelakeyfilm.com/. As with the annual singing of Handel's Messiah he directs, Lakey's legacy is one of creating harmony from disparate voices. By maintaining the dance of democracy at a lively tempo, George Lakey reminds readers, “If we want to dance with history, we better keep dancing” (135). David L. Hostetter is an independent scholar. He is author of Movement Matters: American Antiapartheid Activism and the Rise of Multicultural Politics (2006), co-editor of Congress Investigates: A Documented History (2011), and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Peace History (2023). He is the immediate past president of the Peace History Society.

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