George Lakey - Dancing with History: A Life for Peace and Justice

Join us for a reading and discussion with George Lakey! At Orca Books Cooperative on February 12th at 4pm!

George Lakey committed at age nineteen to a life mission of building a better world through movements for justice. The book describes a young man learning lessons which he applied when dealing with opponents, whether they were threatening him with knives on a street corner or gunboats in a war zone in Vietnam. He describes what it was like to risk his life as an unarmed bodyguard for Sri Lankan human rights lawyers threatened with assassination.  His book recounts his gathering creative tactics, strategy and theory to share through teaching in social change workshops on five continents and breaking new ground as a professor in U.S. universities while mentoring some of today’s young movement leaders.  

He describes how he publicly came out in the early 1970s as a bisexual even though a family man.  Practical lessons for drawing strength from community abound, along with other methods that prevent burn-out and sustain a life-long commitment to dance with history.  

Born into a white working class family in a small town in rural Pennsylvania, George Lakey was first arrested in the civil rights movement and recently for climate justice as an 83-year old great-grandfather. He’s led social change projects on neighborhood, city, state, national, and international levels. He married a Norwegian woman, played cocktail piano in a hotel, taught at the University of Pennsylvania and Swarthmore College, co-parented a majority Black family, came out publicly as gay, and published ten books on how to make change.  He led over 1500 social change workshops on five continents, for Buddhist monks, South African National Congress members, and Northern U.S. students bound for 1964 Mississippi Summer.  A Quaker, he was named Peace Educator of the Year and given the Paul Robeson Social Justice Award and the Martin Luther King Peace Award. 

Event date: 
Sunday, February 12, 2023 - 4:00pm to 5:00pm
Event address: 
315 5th Ave SE
Olympia, WA 98501
Dancing with History: A Life for Peace and Justice By George Lakey Cover Image
$22.95
Book may be unavailable or out of print. Please email or call for more information.
ISBN: 9781644212356
Published: Seven Stories Press - December 6th, 2022

Event Terms: