First arrested in a civil rights sit-in, George Lakey co-authored a handbook for the civil rights movement, “A Manual for Direct Action.” He led over 1500 workshops on five continents and taught at the Martin Luther King School of Social Change, as well as initiated direct action campaigns. A sociologist, he recently retired from Swarthmore College where he founded the Global Nonviolent Action Database, an accessible web-based searchable database of over 1100 direct action campaigns in almost 200 countries. His latest book is, “Viking Economics: How the Scandinavians got it right and how we can, too,” (Melville House, 2016). He is currently working on a new manual for direct action for the current context.
