When Anthony Siracusa, a legally emancipated 17-year-old dropout, tried to set up a free bike repair shop in a Memphis church, he could hardly have imagined that he would – over the next 20 years – help transform the lives of countless youth, spark a movement to turn Tennessee into one of the most bike-friendly (and clean transportation) states in the US South; go on to college and then receive a doctorate degree; and write a pre-eminent intellectual history of the civil rights movement. Siracusa has spent his life practicing – and then studying and teaching – how ordinary people find courage and the “in-dwelling light” that compels them to assert their power  – not as a form of protest or activism, but foremost as a way of being and living in the world with integrity, of asserting their full humanity. He says the “politics of being” – rather than strategy or activist tactics – has animated the most enduring social movements in history.