A new film about George Lakey’s life encourages bravery

This article A new film about George Lakey’s life encourages bravery was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

“I think this moment is the biggest opportunity I have experienced in my lifetime to make major change for justice,” says 86-year-old George Lakey at the start of “Citizen George,” the new film about his life. Unsurprising to those who have read his many articles on Waging Nonviolence over the years, his assessment of our polarized era is based on his observation that the biggest positive leaps in our country’s history have occurred during times of extreme polarization, like the 1930s and the 1960s.

Having forged his identity as a nonviolent activist in the 1960s, he is quick to point out that it was a violent period, with the Klan marching in the streets. But the tumult of the decade also opened space for new possibilities, especially when social movements pushed for them. As this well-timed film shows, we too need vision, courage, grounding and community to make the best of polarized times. 

As a writer and teacher, George has spent decades thinking about how to harness the changing winds of history. One old comrade describes him not as an optimist, but as hopeful, despite his realistic assessment of our problems. George’s daughter Ingrid Lakey says that her father’s approach to activism is not just about stopping harm — as important as that may be — it is also about hope, love and liberation for all of us.

“What do we want to create as a society?” she asks, amid footage of her father being arrested with other grandparents calling for a just and sustainable replacement to the fossil fuel economy. Especially as the looming election takes up our mental and emotional capacity, it’s helpful to be reminded that saying what we want is as important as saying what we don’t want.

Directed by Glenn Holsten, a 23-year veteran of independent filmmaking, “Citizen George” includes archival footage spanning the movements for civil rights, peace, LGBTQ liberation and the climate. Some scenes are animated with narration from George’s memoir, “Dancing with History.” There are also interviews with George’s family and friends, as well as collaborators and mentees (including me). Holsten does a beautiful job of weaving together the threads of George’s personal and public lives, pulling out timely lessons.

One consistent theme is courage. Varshini Prakash, founding executive director of the Sunrise Movement, describes George as “an example of what it means to take action even if you’re scared.” In an early scene, George describes his knocking knees in 1949, at age 12, when he preached to his rural Pennsylvania church that God wanted racial equality, a message that was not well received by his all-white community. He attended Cheyney University, the oldest Black college in the country, in the 1950s, as the only white person in the dorm. He also left his family’s evangelical denomination and became a Quaker, joining a peace church, despite coming from a working-class family proud of its military service. In each case, George followed his sense of calling rather than seeking superficial social acceptance.

In the 1960s, he took greater risks. He was beaten by police in Chester, Pennsylvania, during a civil rights protest. He describes his terror at being arrested alone, the strengthening power of prayer and singing in jail with others in the movement. During the 1964 Freedom Summer campaign, he helped to train others to stay calm amid potential violence, launching his career as a trainer.

Later in the decade, as a young father, George risked his life on the Phoenix, a small sailing ship that defied the U.S. Seventh Fleet as it blockaded the coast of Vietnam. Amid gunships and flying bullets, their team delivered medical aid to Vietnamese civilians — which, as George explains, had the additional purpose of conveying the Vietnamese people’s humanity to U.S. audiences.

Being transparent about his own vulnerability while nonviolently protecting people targeted for assassination, he recalls his time in Sri Lanka in the 1980s as “three months of fear.”

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The film does a beautiful job of weaving George’s Quaker spirituality through these stories. This was the aspect of George I was most surprised by when I got to know him through Earth Quaker Action Team, or EQAT, which was sparked by a talk by George that many Quakers felt was inspired by Spirit. Before joining EQAT, I saw him as a charismatic speaker with a booming voice and strong opinions. In one of our early one-on-one conversations, he spoke about praying for guidance and weeping at the news. I am glad this side of him comes through in the film, where he talks about seeking God’s guidance at every major turning point in his life, especially before risky actions and when he faced a life-threatening cancer.

I believe this overt expression of spirituality from someone on the left is also timely. Although it has always been part of EQAT’s DNA, in recent years, I have sensed in the climate movement a growing interest in spiritually-grounded activism that is also inclusive and accessible to those who might not identify with formal religion. I have also noticed more groups incorporating traditional prayer into their nonviolent direct action, especially Jewish- and Muslim-led actions calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. Whatever forms this takes today, we can learn from the civil rights movement, whose leaders understood that it helps people walk into the lion’s den when they feel connected to and supported by something larger than themselves.

Community plays a complementary role in many of George’s stories. Although the film features George, in most scenes, he is part of a group. Even the making of this film was a communal experience — a first for the filmmaker — with a committee of volunteers holding the project and raising funds for it.

More longterm, Movement for a New Society, or MNS, was a communal experiment in egalitarian and simple living during the 1970s and 80s. In group houses across the country, with the biggest concentration in Philadelphia, members took turns cooking, caring for children and doing chores. This not only gave them the chance to practice principles of equality. It also gave them more time to spend on the feminist, gay liberation and anti-nuclear movements of the time. “We had a mission of working for freedom and justice, but we also discovered beautiful things about ourselves,” George recalls.

Singing is another communal experience that runs through George’s life story. He joined the choir at Cheyney and sang “We Shall Overcome” while holding hands with others in the civil rights movement. Footage of EQAT walking from the frontline community of Chester to the global headquarters of Vanguard shows the marchers singing songs like “Keep Moving On” and “Never Turning Back.” Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, George pushes his piano onto his back porch to be able to sing with friends and family. It was fitting that last week’s Philadelphia premier of “Citizen George” at Friends Center started with 30 minutes of Broadway singing for those who came early.

Thirty-five years after the end of MNS, former members showed up to support the film launch. The crowd of about 200 also included former students, members of organizations he founded, such as EQAT and Training for Change, participants in George’s annual communal singing of Handel’s Messiah, Quakers and multiple generations of his diverse family. After the event, Daniel Hunter, a globally known nonviolence trainer interviewed in the film, observed what an unusually strong community of support George built, which helped him to do all those scary things.

It’s perhaps one of the most important lessons for our times. As people brace for the coming election and its aftermath, we need to remember that what we can face together is much greater than what we can face alone, or when we are only rooted in our nuclear families. Music and prayer are among the tools that can help people expand their capacity together.

George repeatedly describes risk-taking as necessary for growth, part of the liberation that he seeks for everyone. I was moved by the story of how he first shared honestly about his sexuality at a gathering of a thousand Quakers in 1974. Speaking directly after his then-wife Berit Lakey, he told his faith community, “I can love men as well as women.” The crowd was shocked. Some were angry. Others cried in relief at a time when few queer people were out of the closet. Always having known George as a gay man, I hadn’t realized how much he risked by being ahead of that curve.

In the film he describes, “feeling freer, and feeling more powerful because I’d done this really hard thing.” In typical George fashion, he connects the personal empowerment of coming out to social change strategy, describing it as a form of noncooperation, strategically similar to Black people refusing to cooperate with racial segregation. It’s another theme that runs through George’s life, that personal liberation and political liberation are deeply interconnected.

Another timely lesson is the need to learn what works and what doesn’t. This includes studying the craft of change-making, and preparing for action with skill trainings, as the civil rights movement did. In addition to building community within an action group, nonviolent direct action training increases the tools that people have at their disposal, helping to build confidence and a willingness to act. Doing role plays gives people a chance to try things out and learn from their blunders.

In the film, George tells the story of his first arrest, pointing out the mistakes he made in dealing with the police, not to be self-critical, but to help others learn from his experience. Looking back at his time as a white student at a Black college, he says, “I must have made a zillion mistakes. I must have been very annoying, but I was lapping up new experience.”

As someone who has worked closely with George, I’ve seen him make mistakes, and I’ve seen him apologize for them. As an older, white man, he sometimes struggles to understand the perspectives of people of other identities or generations, but he tries harder to reach across those divides than almost anyone I know.

The pain of the gap is most palpable in the story of his own family. In the 1960s, George and Berit adopted two Black children before birthing a third child a few years later. In hindsight, the young white couple did not understand how cross-racial adoption might impact their children. Their oldest daughter Christina appears in the film, acknowledging her father’s deep commitment to justice, along with the fact that he will never truly know what it is like to be Black in America. Berit, who is originally from Norway, shares their painful learning as parents, especially as their second child Peter struggled with addiction.

Peter’s death is a heartbreaking wound the family continues to carry, though once again music, spirituality and community are part of what enables them to continue engaging with the world, amid their own deep grief. Ingrid, their third child, reflected to me after the premiere that being able to hold both joy and sorrow is another skill we all need to strengthen in these violent times. She recalled that the Democratic National Convention blocked out the pain of Gaza in fear that it would dim the convention theme of joy.

For me, this reflects the disempowering pressure to appear perfect, amplified by social media and cancel culture. Today, politicians are loathe to admit mistakes, whether out of ego or the understandable fear that their admission will become a soundbite. “Citizen George” reminds us that acknowledging our shortcomings is another hard thing that helps us learn and grow.

Nonviolent activism involves acknowledging that there are things we can control and things we can’t. One of George’s more recent efforts has been Choose Democracy, founded with Daniel Hunter and Jenny Zimmer in the summer of 2020, when it became clear that Donald Trump might not leave office willingly if he lost the election. Trump’s actions were not something the small team could control, but they could help prepare Americans, using lessons from countries that had overcome coup attempts. I joined as trainings coordinator, and within several weeks we trained 10,000 people in nonviolent strategies ordinary people could employ to strengthen our democracy.

Zein Nakoda, executive director of Training for Change and a key part of the Choose Democracy launch, explains in the film, “George has a fundamental belief that everybody has a role to play, and that everyday people can do extraordinary things — and it’s just a matter of inviting people into their power.” It’s the reason George agreed to let a film be made about his life. He hopes that it might encourage others to be brave and keep taking action, especially at this moment when retreating into fear is so tempting. “Citizen George” achieves this goal by telling the story of a life — forged amid division, violence, love and loss — a life that continues to offer hope that what we do together can move us closer to the Beloved Community we long for.

For more information on how to see the film visit Bullfrog Films.

This article A new film about George Lakey’s life encourages bravery was originally published by Waging Nonviolence.

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Source: https://wagingnonviolence.org/2024/09/citizen-george-lakey-documentary-film-encourages-bravery/