George Lakey: strategic campaigner & recipient of the 2008 Dr. King Peace Prize

This summer, I had the great opportunity to meet George Lakey, someone who is renowned in the peace and justice community for his lifetime of activism and his teachings. George and I were both speakers at the 2008 Seabeck conference in the Seattle, Washington, area. He had just been announced as the awardee for this year’s Martin Luther King, Jr. Peace Prize, so there was a special connection when we met, and just a few weeks later we reconnected via the phone to talk more about his work through the years.

George founded or co-founded several social justice initiatives, including the Movement for a New Society, the Philadelphia Jobs with Peace Campaign, Men Against Patriarchy, and Training for Change. He has led more than 1,500 workshops on five continents and authored seven books. Trained as a sociologist, Lakey has taught at the college and graduate level, including at the Martin Luther King School for Social Change.

An edited version of this interview will appear in the commemorative journal that will be distributed on September 14th at FOR’s fourth annual Festival of Peace, which George will attend and at which he will receive the Dr. King Award. However, given the importance of his emphasis on building strategic campaigns throughout our movement, I thought it was important to share the full text of our conversation online.

Please come and join us in Upper Nyack, NY, on Sunday the 14th if you can, to help us celebrate peace and to honor George Lakey and the other awardees — three of whom will travel from Latin America to be here!

FOR: How did you become involved in the peace and justice movement?

George Lakey: My entry into the movement, as such, was wandering into a Quaker meeting when I was 18 and an undergraduate at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. I found myself being moved by the worship style and the people I met. I was dubious about the “pacifist side” — I initially felt that was the “downside” of the Quaker faith. Mainly my interest was based on the quality of the people I met, and the sense that the spirit can be leading us to the frontiers where the mainstream is not present.

FOR: What led you to West Chester University, and into the doors of the Friends meeting house?

Lakey: [West Chester] was the only school that I could afford! My family was poor, and I was looking at state schools. As for the Quakers, I was making a tour of the various churches. It was “exploration time.” I had grown up in an evangelical fundamentalist tradition.

FOR: What were the peace and justice issues that initially resonated with you? How did you begin to develop a connection with FOR?

Lakey: The biggest issue that I was drawn to was civil rights. I was fortunate in that the community of friends I was making was connected to many peace and justice leaders across the country, and those people would regularly visit our community to talk about their work. My friends brought Ralph Abernathy to town to talk about the Montgomery Bus Boycott. They brought A. J. Muste to town to talk about pacifism.

Charlie Walker was one of these people that I met, and at that point he was on the national staff of FOR. He served as a field staff person in Philadelphia. Charlie quickly became a mentor and friend to me.

So I was being influenced toward pacifism, which was a central belief for most people in this community. I didn’t want to be a pacifist! My family wouldn’t support it. I read everything I could against pacifism. I read Rienhold Neibuhr. I read a Marxist named John Lewis, who was a major Communist Party theoretician. He wrote The Case Against Pacifism. I was willing to read anybody who would talk to me against pacifism.

But I couldn’t find a sufficiently strong case against pacifism to prevent me from adopting it as my belief. By the time that I was 19, I had made that decision. I signed an FOR membership, and also signed the War Resisters League pledge. It was important for me to take those steps to state my belief.

I started doing street speaking with Charlie. We went to Washington for the Youth March on Integration in 1958. I heard Dr. King speak there. His books, especially the chapter “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” in Stride Toward Freedom, were very influential for me.

FOR: You said that you had grown up in an evangelical fundamentalist Christian household. Did your new spiritual and socio-political beliefs cause friction with your family?

Lakey: Well, the Vietnam War was helpful — my parents began to see that I’d been right all along. My whole family first thought I was crazy. Then my family began to see that what I’d been expressing in terms of the war, especially, had been correct. So we were able to stay in relationship.

FOR: In early July, you delivered a keynote address to the 50th annual Seabeck conference of FOR Pacific Northwest members. Your stories highlighted the fact that nonviolence work is creative and can even be hilarious. FOR member Dorothy Cotton stresses that the civil rights movement was as fun as it was serious — that song and jokes were as much of the movement as strategy sessions. How important for you is humor in this work?

Lakey: The circle of people that I fell into from the get-go was a fun-loving group. Charlie Walker loved humor. When he was speaking on the street, he invited heckling — always — as well as questions and comments. He’d be provocative if he needed to be. So I definitely had the impression that pacifists were people who had an integrated worldview, not that they were about to fall apart from the burden of holding up the world.

I think that the toughest period in my life was during the mid-”˜60s — especially 1967, 68, 69 — from the anti-Vietnam war people. This was when people became even more desperate, when a movement culture emerged of desperation. One expression of that was the Weather [Underground] people. There have been various times that we have been a culture that is death-focused rather than life-grounded, and that was one period.

But even in the midst of that tension I have been surrounded by people who felt that you go out and promote a culture of life and positive social change. I think the fact that we have continued moving forward as a peace and justice movement, gaining victories, has been critical to that sense of change and hope.

FOR: It is somewhat surprising to hear you speak in that positive way. For those of us who grew up in the 1980s and ”˜90s, there is sometimes the sense that our losses have outweighed the victories.

Lakey: The Reagan period was very tough. Most of the Reagan years were spent trying to hold the ground to prevent the reversal of the gains we’d made before. Up until Reagan, we felt that we were framing the ground, winning victories. We had made such strides, year by year: the civil rights movement; Cesar Chavez and the migrant workers movement; the anti-poverty movement; the Grey Panthers; the women’s movement; the environmental movement; the lesbian and gay movement; etc.

Throughout that period, we were on the offensive, and the right wing was on the defensive. Even though at times the sheer amount of awareness of the suffering — especially I think of the napalming of the people in Vietnam — would almost clog our sensibility, nevertheless there was a sense of being on the offensive. But then it became reactive: can we defend this, can we defend that.

An exception would be the lesbian/ gay/ bi/ transgender movement, which stayed on the offensive and continues to win victories to this day.

FOR: When you started your activism, in the 1950s, the religious context of this peace work in the U.S. was a very Christian context. What has it been like over the past half-century to see how interfaith the movement has become?

Lakey: Horizon expanding!

It seems like in each decade I have had the opportunity to be in some “seminar” about how much bigger a picture there is than what I had before. At the end of the 1960s, I was learning to have an understanding of Empire. In the ”˜70s, it was an understanding of the environment, and also about sexual oppression, and the linking of misogyny and homophobia. In the ”˜80s, as we were watching the right wing gather itself — and watching the rich gather themselves — what an opportunity that was to learn about class, and internally-organized class society and Empire. And having enough distance then from the communist-obsessed ”˜50s, without fear that something that was focused on class was therefore communist.

How would I describe it? Fresh air — more light — more light.

In the ”˜90s, way more connections were being made with systematic oppressions. Therefore, it was a feeling of not being overwhelmed with “Oh, great, I’m a white male, why do I even get up in the morning if my whole life is going to be spent in oppressing other people!” It was “Ahhh, we made some ground in this, that can be applied to sexual oppression, that can be applied to class. So let’s look at this transgender question, because I’m going into this with background in other struggles.” My identification as a social movement activist has given me a ticket to lifelong learning.

FOR: Is this what led to the creation of Training for Change in 1992?

Lakey: Yes. By that time I felt I had put so many years into learning so many things that there were to learn, I felt that I had time to put into teaching it to others. It was the sense that I had always enjoyed teaching, but except for the years in the Martin Luther King school, where I taught in the ”˜60s, I had not put that into practice full time. So, yeah, I felt that this is the early ”˜90s, this is a good time to turn myself into a full-time trainer, and to do that and mentor other people.

FOR: You reduced your load as full-time executive director at Training for Change a few years after founding the organization, so that you could care for two of your grandchildren. FOR, like many nonprofits today, has struggled with a culture of nonstop working. How have you experienced the process of creating a sustainable work environment?

Lakey: At Training for Change, we had initially operated on the usual tiny organizational mode, when the executive director would work 60-plus hours a week. Working with the organization’s board, we renegotiated what their expectations would be. Some weeks I would work 30 hours, some weeks it would be more.

I think at Training for Change, the fact that the board was a feminist board was key — there was a recognition that the personal is political. We need to be healthy in order to do this work. Gandhi’s phrase was “Be the change you want to see in the world.” There needs to be the Being dimension as well as the Doing dimension.

So I think the women’s movement was a huge factor in our change of priorities. I think another factor was a growing class understanding in our organization. The way we look at class — and we’re not alone — the function of the owning class is to own stuff. Traditionally in our culture, the role of the working class is to “produce, produce, produce,” and the role of the middle class is to manage. A lot of organizations have adopted a middle class tone — management — with those people on their boards and on their staff. Even with the best people in the world, it’s hard to not adopt a middle-class sense that prioritizes “productivity” in its more crass terms.

The world of bosses, which Pete Seeger talks about, replicates itself in the nonprofit world. Well, we decide that we’re not going to just adopt that classist tone, we’re going to be present with productivity in a different way.

FOR: Since you retired at the end of 2006, what is the current status of Training for Change?

Lakey: The decision of the board was to not hire a next executive director to fill my shoes, but to let our training associates continue to respond to requests, and to pay one of the training associates to answer phone calls. Basically, it was to put the organization into a very low level of activity, to be on a watchful, waiting basis.

We had to ask ourselves, how much does the universe really want a full-blown Training for Change? In agriculture, the land is sometimes left to lay fallow periodically, which rejuvenates the earth and prepares it for the next period of growth. Training for Change is in this fallow period right now.

FOR: As you step back and take a look at the movement today, what suggestions would you have to activists based on your lifetime of work?

Lakey: I can’t wait to see more people become strategic! I think that would make a huge difference. To my mind the anti-war movement hasn’t really had a strategy. Strategy is still on our wish list — it’s to help us develop “chops” with respect to our organizing. I really hope that we actually develop strategic thinking skills, and then I think we’ll win way, way more than we’ve won.

And then I think that we need to focus on doing campaigns. This is one of the ways that white activists could have learned more from our black sisters and brothers in the 1960s.

The anti-Iraq war movement doesn’t usually do campaigns. It is averse to strategizing! A number of people that I’ve mentored have gone to various anti-war organizing conclaves and said, “How about we do some strategy?” and people say back to them, “NO, no.”

This makes a tremendous change for groups like FOR, through using nonviolent strategy. It’s a tremendous internal contradiction otherwise — I think we should either stop citing the successes that came from using strategy [in our history] or make strategizing central to how we do work now.

The campaign piece is key — a campaign mobilizes the energy to focus on a particular winnable goal. It’s so different from a lifestyle. It’s not about lifestyle, it’s about choosing what your goal is, and working toward that. I think back to Montgomery: there was the campaign to win in Montgomery, and then afterward there would be a lot of chicken dinners! Go out, do the organizing, and then slack off!

Campaigns are a way to get something actually won — and this is essential, because people get more inspired by wins than losses. Peace and justice work is more sustainable when people have the ability to focus energy, and then to relax. Think of our bodies: both inhaling and exhaling are important. Bodies like both, and why shouldn’t our work be like this too? Campaigns reflect that need.

FOR: Could you offer an example of a campaign that has been successful in the post-civil rights period, which could help inspire us today?

Lakey: One of the campaigns where we succeeded — during a period of great weakness in the peace movement — was getting [President] Jimmy Carter to cancel the B-1 bomber. We had CALC [Clergy and Laity Concerned], AFSC, FOR, and many labor unions — a large but a still relatively weak coalition — but we knew what we were doing. We knew we had three years. And we did have that period of time. The internal life of the organizations while we were doing that — especially as we were coming up to an action — could be very intense at times. It wasn’t an invitation to martyrdom, but it was an invitation to focus your life on it in a major way for a period of time.

The great thing about strategizing is that it puts us in charge. It’s not about reacting to the latest terrible Reagan or Bush thing that happened. We need a six- to nine-month goal that we can achieve in a reasonable amount of time. Depending on our resources, that might be six months or a few years. . So let’s find a goal that we can achieve in that period. And afterward, when we’re in a hammock, sipping our lemonade, we can reflect on it! I think some of us, unfortunately, play a game with our unconsciousness, so that we don’t set up a goal where we can actually win or lose. A campaign — like either you get the Voting Rights Act or you don’t, or you get this lunch counter integrated or you don’t — helps us to do something, and then to reflect on what works.

The Polish Solidarity movement was a classic example of that. Look at the Gdansk shipyard: they got a lot done, but it took time and some losses. Their first campaign, they lost. And they sat back and looked it, and said to themselves, “Well, we let a lot of vodka into the shipyard, and it turns out that we don’t do well when people are drunk!” Each successive campaign was larger, each campaign got them further down the road, so eventually they won a campaign and they got to run the whole country. Campaigns with clear goals give us the chance to have a brilliant learning curve.

When I was 20, I thought it was charming for Quakers and FOR people to hold a vigil in front of a huge building, and I joined them. When I was 40, after learning the civil rights movement’s model, I asked: What are we getting out of this? There are no media. There is no goal. There is an anti-growth curve that comes out of a “witness” event. We need wins.

FOR: Why do you believe the anti-Iraq war movement has been resistant to doing campaigns and strategic organizing? Could you offer an idea of a campaign that could be effective in our current movement?

Lakey: I am often asked to consult with peace and justice organizations, and in my strategy consultations with movements, I do work very hard on this. But I have found that the anti-war movement has been so closed to this method of working — it’s very difficult.

Off the top, I would say that state campaigns that focus on the National Guard might be tempting. And some U.S. states could win, if anti-war activists designed a campaign to block their state’s National Guard from participating in imperialist wars, or something like that. I could envision a “We want local boy John Anderson in Iraq to be back in the hardware store where he belongs” type of focus. Some kind of down-home way of approaching this. This could really increase the amount of muscle we have on the war. I haven’t researched this, but am intrigued by this idea.

I don’t know why there isn’t a national direct action campaign about torture. I know that the National Religious Campaign Against Torture exists, but I don’t know that it’s a direct action campaign. I only know that it’s about lobbying, and to me that’s almost a willful ignorance of lessons of the civil rights movement. It’s very, very hard for me to understand this. I don’t even understand the power analysis that says the way to get something difficult done is by avoiding nonviolent direct action.

There is low-hanging fruit available on a range of issues, but people are unwilling to pick that fruit because (a) they are unwilling to be strategic, and (2) they are unwilling to have direct action be an aspect of their organizing.

FOR: Are you hopeful?

Lakey: I’m hopeful — not based on “Can we save the American empire from itself?” — not on that macro level. Because I think the power holders are caught in that Greek tragedy of empires overextending themselves by becoming more militarist, and the U.S. empire is in rapid decline because the power holders don’t know any other way to operate.

But I’m hopeful when people stand up for themselves. When people say: We’re not going to be part of that. We’re going to be part of a campaign of this or that. Whatever part of society we’re located in, we’re going to find allies and design a campaign.

I think of the Casino Free Movement here in Philadelphia — I came back from the Seabeck conference and found out they had won another victory. They had forced the governor to call a meeting of casinos with the anti-casino mayor of Philadelphia and a couple of key anti-casino state senators. The anti-casino campaigners were mostly not activist-identified people, but people with a lot of backbone, who were being guided by folks with a lot of strategy experience. They have stopped this billion-dollar industry from doing what it wants to do here in Philadelphia.

They are taking the tools that Dorothy Cotton and Ella Baker and the rest developed, and making them relevant, taking them seriously. And that would be my challenge to all activists — to re-learn what people have already learned, and apply it! That gives me hope.