The Joyful Rebellion of George Lakey

A Review of Citizen George

Citizen George (2024). Directed by Glenn Holsten, produced by Natalie Valentine. 99 minutes. Available to stream on Vimeo ($3.99/rent; $9.99/buy), or for community screenings via Bullfrog Films.

These days Quaker activist George Lakey has been taking more time to reflect on his nearly 90 years of living. His memoir, Dancing with History, came out at the end of 2022, recounting the ups and downs of his long life working for peace, equality, and social justice, and now much of that book has been adapted for the screen. Citizen George is a feature-length documentary centered on Lakey and his remarkable legacy, not only in the realms of activism, civil rights, movement building, and nonviolent training, but in the hearts of those many people he has loved and inspired. Family, students, and comrades in justice speak openly about Lakey’s influence on their views of the world and of themselves as individuals with the power to enact great change.

Many Friends and activists involved with peace and social justice movements around the world have likely encountered Lakey in their own pursuits—tall with a loud voice, easy smile, and boundless optimism, he’s hard to miss. He has a confident presence in person, whether leading workshops, giving talks and lectures, or marching alongside fellow citizens. He’s also contributed a wealth of knowledge through his writings and teachings: articles, training manuals, college courses, and more than ten published books across every decade since the 1960s. All told, his work has reached and inspired tens of thousands.

Director Glenn Holsten beautifully captures Lakey’s essence in a way that words and photos alone can’t. Using a mix of current footage, archival elements, and motion graphics, the documentary presents a dynamic and nuanced picture of who Lakey is and what fuels his tireless work for justice: from his beginnings in a white, working-class town in eastern Pennsylvania to his most recent arrest a few years ago as a great-grandfather protesting against Chase Bank’s financing of the climate crisis. We watch as Lakey is handcuffed by police, his voiceover saying that he expects to still be doing something even at age 105. “I think everyone’s responsibility is to continue to be a citizen until we die,” he says. “Why not? We can die as Americans.”

At age 19, Lakey’s life mission was set. As he tells it, while participating in an American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) summer workcamp in Lynn, Mass., he was walking along the beach for hours one night asking God what he should do with his life. He got an answer: “The message was clear as crystal,” he says early in the film, seated in the Central Philadelphia Meetinghouse where he’s been a member for decades. “My life was to be about social change, about moving society toward justice.” He had already found Quakers, and this sense of clarity, of opening himself up to Spirit’s way, comes up again and again as he navigates the challenges of living out a firm commitment to his beliefs.

The film’s narrative moves back and forth in time, whether looking back at black-and-white snapshots from Lakey’s younger days and family life or highlighting key historical events that have shaped his work. Ample time is given to present-day Lakey, who is either seated in front of the camera or on foot bringing us along as he revisits some of the significant places from his past. But no matter where the viewer finds him, there are constant threads of gratitude, joy, and love, even amidst great difficulty, such as a cancer diagnosis at 39 and the sudden death of his son.

Throughout all of his activism, Lakey manages to maintain a life outside of the busyness of organizing. At that same AFSC summer workcamp, he met his wife, Berit, a student from Norway. They quickly married, and briefly lived in Norway, where Lakey studied nonviolence with political scientist Gene Sharp until he eventually realized that the socially stable Scandinavian country was doing fine; he wasn’t “needed” there. America on the other hand was “where the action was,” so they flew back and started a family, adopting two biracial children, Christina and Peter, before Berit got pregnant with their third child, Ingrid.

The film covers his contributions to an impressive list of citizen-led movements over the past six decades, presenting compelling archival visuals and featuring interviews with those also involved in each project or period. A proponent for racial equality since adolescence, Lakey felt compelled to join in the efforts of the Civil Rights Movement, including participating in the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project, where he learned the importance of nonviolence training for facing tough situations.

Showing up in solidarity with the Black students of Chester, Pa., led to his first arrest in 1964 for protesting segregation in the public schools there. This arrest is the one he is most proud of, he says, “because I was so clueless about everything.” Having gotten separated from his fellow demonstrators, Lakey, then 26, finds himself alone in Chester’s city hall and unsure where or how to conduct their planned sit-in. With Lakey’s memory as the primary source, the event is dramatically reenacted in graphic novel style with captions and speech bubbles filled in with his words as he reads aloud an excerpt from his memoir. He spends a week in county jail, where campaign leader Stanley Branche is also being held. Memorably for Lakey, Branche led the others in their cell block in singing freedom songs, including the hymn “We Are Soldiers in the Army.” The case is eventually dismissed, and Lakey’s rebel identity is solidified.

There’s Lakey on the Phoenix of Hiroshima, with a Quaker crew sailing through a naval blockade to deliver medical supplies to North Vietnam during the war. There’s newspaper clippings and handwritten notes and diagrams from the early days of Movement for a New Society, founded in the 1970s by Lakey and other idealists in West Philadelphia. There’s Lakey at a gay rights protest, a cause that became personal after he came out as a bisexual man before a crowd of a thousand Friends at an annual Quaker gathering. There’s Lakey in a news clip highlighting his work with Training for Change, the center he cofounded to help people be “their nonviolent best” when the pressure’s on. There’s Lakey in Sri Lanka, recruited by Peace Brigades International to nonviolently protect human rights lawyers in danger there.

Seeking justice can be a painfully slow process in real time, so there’s a satisfaction in witnessing the wins realized over Lakey’s lifetime, such as Earth Quaker Action Team’s success in 2015 in getting PNC Bank to stop financing mountaintop removal coal mining. The film’s propulsion demonstrates the momentum that step-by-step progress can generate. We learn that EQAT is now marching for another climate justice campaign, and there’s Lakey again on the front line. Through all of his 60-plus years of activism, Lakey has been amazingly consistent in three things: showing up in solidarity with others, passing on whatever wisdom he’s gained, and listening to Spirit for guidance.

Since the film’s premiere at the Friends General Conference Gathering in Haverford, Pa., last summer, there’s been steady buzz from Friends who praise and recommend it. It reached beyond Quaker circles at last fall’s Philadelphia Film Festival, which showed it twice and awarded it an Honorable Mention for Humanitarianism under its Best Filmadelphia Feature category. Since then, Friends have organized a number of screenings on the East Coast, including an upcoming showing at a local theater outside of Philadelphia this May. It’s now available to stream at home, and Friends can contact Bullfrog Films (bullfrogfilms.com) to host a community screening.

Near the end of the film, Zein Nakhoda, director of Training for Change, comments on Lakey’s ability to, despite the struggle, conflict, and difficulty in the work, still find joy in living through it and being a part of change. This is also what stands out to me about Lakey. John Lewis told us to get into “good trouble,” and Bayard Rustin encouraged us to be “angelic troublemakers.” In my assessment after watching Citizen George, George Lakey is urging us to be joyful rebels. As he points out, “If you look at history, the biggest positive changes happened in periods of enormous polarization.” We deserve a transformed country, he says, but we can only achieve that with “huge numbers of people in motion to take on the forces that oppose us. Let’s do it.”

As the current U.S. presidential administration continues to move toward authoritarianism, I believe we need all the joyful rebellion we can muster. Citizen George has arrived just in time to bring Lakey’s story and work to an even wider audience. I’m grateful to Lakey for his eagerness to share what he has learned over a lifetime of organizing, protesting, training, and pushing past his comfort zone, and I’m grateful for this film.