Non-Violent Action: How it Works

Pendle Hill Pamphlets

by George Lakey

We use this term “nonviolent action” because, though the behavior of the persons described is determined enough, and even in its own way forceful, it is without physical violence. As it happened, the nonviolent action was successful in many cases; the Quakers were given religious liberty by the Puritans, the sit-ins integrated the Nashville lunch counters, Bismarck backed down, and Pilate also relented.Evidently, nonviolent action has some kind of power, even when the action is not very spectacular. The question then arises, what is this power? Some people say, “It is the power of God,” others say, “It is the power of love.” Either answer leads to further questions, for just as the astronomer does not feel his task is done when he hears the stars defined as “the wonders of nature,” so we are not content with a philosophical description of nonviolent action. The task of this pamphlet, therefore, is to discover the how of nonviolent action.

25 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 13, 2015

About the author

George Lakey is the director of Training for Change. He began his career as a trainer at the Martin Luther King School for Social Change, and has since gone on to lead over 1000 workshops on five continents. He has run trainings for coal miners, therapists, homeless people, prisoners, Russian lesbians and gays, Sri Lankan monks, Burmese guerrilla soldiers, striking steel workers, South African activists, and others. Trained as a sociologist, he has taught at the college and graduate level and is the author of six books. He consults regularly with a wide range of nonprofit groups.

George has given leadership to a number of social change movements. In late 1989 he led a team of Westerners in Sri Lanka who for 24 hours a day accompanied human-rights activists at risk of assassination. He has done neighborhood organizing, once successfully preventing tree-cutting and another time creating a neighborhood festival to celebrate ethnic diversity. He co-founded the Movement for a New Society, which for nearly 20 years specialized in organizational innovation. He founded and directed the Philadelphia Jobs with Peace Campaign, a coalition of labor, civil rights, poverty and peace groups. He was a designer of and staffed the Campaign to Stop the B-1 Bomber and Promote Peace Conversion, which mobilized sufficiently to gain cancellation of the B-1 in 1977 and raise the visibility of the concept of economic conversion. He was director of A Quaker Action Group when it assisted Puerto Rican nationalists in stopping the U.S. Navy from using the inhabited island of Culebra for target practice. He was also a founder of Men Against Patriarchy, which organized pioneering projects for the early men's anti-sexism movement of the mid-'70s.

George has taught peace studies at Swarthmore and Haverford Colleges, Temple University and the University of Pennsylvania. At Penn he brought the program from 11 students in one class to 105 in three sections; the administration lauded the program for the way it reached out to students of color. He also created a group dynamics lab at Penn for training men in new leadership styles under a federal grant for feminist education.

George's sixth book is on organizational development: "Grassroots and Nonprofit Leadership: A Guide for Organizations in Changing Times" (1996). He is author or co-author of five previous books: "A Manual for Direct Action" (often called the "Bible" of direct action by Southern civil-rights activists of the '60s); "In Place of War, Moving toward a New Society"; "No Turning Back: Lesbian and Gay Liberation for the '80s"; and "Powerful Peacemaking: A Strategy for a Living Revolution." His publications have been translated into Swedish, German, Danish, French, Japanese and Thai.

On the personal side, George is a Quaker, father, grandfather, and great-grandfather in an interracial family. He received the national Giraffe Award (1992) for "sticking his neck out for the common good," and the Ashley Montague Peace Award (1998) from the International Conference on Conflict Resolution.

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this pamphlet from 1963, I realized George Lakey has been a Quaker nonviolent activist since his graduate student days! A great example of living your values and the meaning of the integrity aspect of Quaker faith.

Lakey outlines different success paths one might achieve through nonviolent action -- coercion, conversion and persuasion -- and provides useful examples from history throughout the short guide. He challenges himself through the use of a doubting friend asking tough questions that help Lakey elaborate on key points.