This announcement is belated but nonetheless exciting! This past summer, Prof. George Lakey was awarded the Martin Luther King, Jr. Peace Prize by the Fellowship of Reconiliation. Here is the college’s press release:
Lang Professor George Lakey
Receives Martin Luther King, Jr. Peace Prize
by Alisa Giardinelli
06/27/2008
Lifelong nonviolent activist and educator George Lakey is the recipient of the 2008 Martin Luther King, Jr. Peace Prize from the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). For 50 years, Lakey has led social change campaigns on local, national, and international levels, and over 1500 workshops on five continents.
 George Lakey |
“Though I never met him personally, Dr. King was a mentor to me in a sense,” says Lakey, who will begin an unprecedented third year as the College’s Eugene M. Lang Visiting Professor for Issues in Social Change this fall. ?”I hung on his every word.”
Lakey will receive the award when he gives the keynote address at FOR’s 50th annual conference in Seabeck, Wash., on July 4. He will be honored at a second ceremony at FOR’s New York headquarters in September.
As Lang Professor, Lakey advises students, conducts research, and leads workshops at Swarthmore, as well as at Haverford and Bryn Mawr Colleges, the University of Pennsylvania, and in Chester, Pa. This year, he gave a campus-wide address as part of the College’s King Day celebration. Next spring, he will repeat his popular course, “Nonviolent Responses to Terrorism,” as part of the College’s offerings in Peace and Conflict Studies.
Lakey is the author of seven books and his work has been translated into at least six languages. His first arrest was for a civil rights sit-in in Chester and he co-authored A Manual for Direct Action, which was widely used in the South in the 1960s. Other titles include Powerful Peacemaking: A Strategy for a Living Revolution and Grassroots and Nonprofit Leadership: A Guide for Organizations in Changing Times. He previously received the Paul Robeson Award for Social Justice from the Bread and Roses Community Fund and the national Giraffe Award for “sticking his neck out for the public good.” Two of his public talks,?Swarthmore’s 2008 Baccalaureate address and his lecture “Making Nonviolent Struggle More Powerful: Framing Strategies,” are available at www.swarthmore.edu.
Since 1915, FOR, a national pacifist organization in which Dr. King was active, has conducted programs and educational projects concerned with domestic and international peace and justice, nonviolent alternatives to conflict, and the rights of conscience. A part of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, it established the King Peace Prize in 1979?to honor those who make a significant contribution to the furtherance of Dr. King’s non-violent approach to transforming racial, economic, and social injustices.
Stephen Zunes
In November 2008, Swarthmore Students for a Democratic Society joined peace activists from across the country at the annual vigil to close the School of the Americas, a purported training academy for mercenary armies serving repressive regimes in Latin America, at Fort Benning, Ga. You can 
Some assignments take advantage of the rich special collections available on campus. In Living in the Light: Quakers Past and Present (Religion 23), taught by Ellen Ross, students are invited to use the Friends Historical Library and the Peace Collection to complete their final research paper. The assignment is open-ended, on any topic related to the Quakers, and students work closely with Professor Ross to craft their topics and discover their sources. For example, when a student wrote about 19th century Quaker women and peace efforts, Professor Ross and the student deciphered the flowery script of letters from the Peace Collection written by Lucy Biddle Lewis, who was active in Quaker postwar relief work and was the national Chairman of the Women??s International League for Peace and Freedom.