George Lakey is 86 and still getting arrested. He wants you to join him in the streets.

A dozen people filed into the U.S. Custom House on a recent Thursday morning, sat down in front of a row of bemused guards, and began to sing. Among them was George Lakey, 6-foot-3 with a shock of white hair, enunciating each word with the earnest focus of a child at choir practice.

“I’m gonna lay down my sword and shield, down by the riverside,” Lakey and the others sang as they blocked the entrance to the federal building.

The group, Fridays at Fetterman’s, began standing vigil outside of Sen. John Fetterman’s office in December, pushing him to support a cease-fire in a war that has now killed nearly 34,000 Palestinians and 1,200 Israelis, according to local health authorities. They repeatedly asked to meet with the senator, but he remained staunchly opposed to any talk of cease-fire.

So the group decided to escalate by occupying the entrance to Fetterman’s office, deliberately risking arrest. They called Lakey to join.

Lakey is a direct action guru in Philadelphia and across the country. He is 86, a Quaker expert on nonviolence and a longtime professional troublemaker. First arrested at a Chester sit-in against segregation in 1963, he has been handcuffed many, many times since. (His daughter, Ingrid Lakey, asked her child before the Fetterman action how they felt about Grandpa getting arrested: “They’re like, ‘whatever,’” she said.)

Lakey has waged many winning political battles, but perhaps more fundamentally, he has been waging a lifelong philosophical battle: that humanity is not worth giving up on just yet.

“We have to be so thoughtful about these small demonstrations, so that they will communicate to the next layer of people who might join,” Lakey said. “Then the next layer, then the next layer, then the next layer, and next thing you know, you’ve got a mass movement.”

These days, he often cries over the morning paper. He is also deeply, truly hopeful. Even with the country polarized and a high-stakes presidential election rapidly approaching; oceans rising and glaciers melting and climate catastrophe bearing down. Even after a recent 20-state book tour for his memoir, Dancing with History: A Life for Peace and Justice, during which he saw college students more terrified for the future than he’d seen in 50 years of working with them.

Hope is no trivial feeling, for someone like him.

“It’s not a Pollyanna,” said Ingrid Lakey, who is 52 and lives four blocks from the self-described “urban commune” where she was raised in West Philly. “[It’s not] ‘Oh, it’ll all work out fine.’ But he does believe people power is what will make the difference.”

In the lobby of Fetterman’s office, Lakey and the other activists, many of them also Quakers, began to sing louder. Some clapped; others thumped tambourines.

“I’m here to advise you that you are causing a disturbance or an obstruction to the entrance to this facility,” a police officer with the Department of Homeland Security told them. “You have five minutes to disperse or be subject to arrest.”

The group did not budge, and the officers returned with plastic zip ties. Lakey extended his wrists peaceably to be handcuffed.

The escalation had an impact: In Washington, D.C., four others were arrested for sitting in at Fetterman’s office, and he spoke with the group for the first time, the organizers said.

“Protests are representative democracy in action and Sen. Fetterman and his team are always ready to hear from Pennsylvanians,” Fetterman’s spokesperson told The Inquirer.

Lakey knew the group wasn’t an actual threat to the senator’s office — theater is a key part of nonviolent social change. Through the organization he cofounded in 1992, Training for Change, Lakey has taught thousands of people how to use creative direct actions to catch the attention of the world.

The goal is to build a mass movement that makes it easier for those in power to align with the movement’s demands rather than continue to oppose them.

“It’s a form of struggle,” said Lakey, who laughs loudly and often, even when discussing dire circumstances. “The way that’s more likely to get a righteous cause to succeed is to choose nonviolent struggle. But nonviolent struggle can be very tough. And it can be very full of casualties.”

Over the years, Lakey helped sail a “Quaker peace ship” filled with medical supplies into a war zone during the Vietnam War; served as an unarmed bodyguard for human rights workers in Sri Lanka in 1989; led workshops on nonviolence with the African National Congress to prepare for South Africa’s first postapartheid election in 1994; and walked 200 miles in 2012 as part of a successful campaign to pressure PNC Bank to withdraw financing from mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia.

He grew up in a working-class family at the foot of the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania; his father worked as a knitter in a hosiery mill, and his mother worked in a blouse mill. He was raised evangelical and became Quaker in college, moved by the belief that there is some of God in everyone. As a young adult, he soaked up the teachings of the civil rights movement.

Lakey and his wife Berit raised three children in a capacious cooperative home in West Philadelphia (at one point, 11 people lived there). They had an open marriage and he publicly came out as bisexual in the 1970s. The home was an intentionally feminist collective, with shared chores and political organizing; Ingrid showed up to elementary school wearing her “Nuclear Power? No Way!” T-shirt.

Lakey also trained the next generation — and the one after that.

Daniel Hunter, 43, who is now global trainings associate director at the climate advocacy organization 350, first met Lakey at a workshop when Hunter was 17. He didn’t like something Lakey was telling the group, and told him so. Lakey listened closely, and said he was not persuaded. Hunter pressed — I think it’s wrong, he said. Lakey said again that he heard, but that he was going to continue with the training as he had planned it. He said if Hunter was still convinced of his view, Hunter should stop trying to convince Lakey and go organize the rest of the people in the room.

“This was the first time that I’d ever been coached how to be a better rebel,” said Hunter, who later became a codirector at Training for Change after Lakey retired.

Teaching the long and successful history of nonviolent protest is part of the philosophical battle, too. As a professor of social change at Swarthmore for seven years, Lakey led a course where students helped create a global database of nonviolent actions.

Alexa Ross, a student in the class, studied examples of Native Americans occupying land at Alcatraz in 1969 and Iranians leading a general strike for democracy in 1907. She was struck.

“There’s no country, no place on earth, [where] there hasn’t been a history of humans collectively organizing for the improvement of their lives,” she said. That was radically different from the mainstream understanding that “nothing can change, and we don’t have power and I don’t have power,” Ross, 33, said.

Six students from that Swarthmore class moved together to a collective house in West Philly after graduating, and then fanned out across the country to put their learning to work. Ross cofounded the environmental justice group Philly Thrive, which campaigned and successfully shuttered the oldest oil refinery on the East Coast in South Philly. Others went on to help found Sunrise, the national youth climate advocacy organization.

At Fetterman’s office, Lakey received a citation and paid a fine.

Then he returned home and took a nap. He’s more tired than he used to be, and although he said he never enjoyed getting arrested, it has become more stressful as he ages.

A few days after the action, Lakey said he had been reflecting on “the enormous capacity that human beings have to make breakthroughs. And in that sense, how little excuse we have to be doing the same old, same old.”