Mary Lou Finley served on Martin Luther King, Jr.’s staff in Chicago in the mid-1960s.  She is a sociologist and Professor Emeritus at Antioch University Seattle and a lifelong activist on social justice issues.   She is the co-author with Bill Moyer and two others of Doing Democracy:  The MAP Model for Organizing Social Movements, and she is a co-editor of The Chicago Freedom Movement:  Martin Luther King, Jr. and Civil Rights Activism in the Northwith Bernard LaFayette, Jr., James R. Ralph Jr. and Pam Smith.

She is a co-founder of the Addie Wyatt Center for Nonviolence Training—Chicago, a certified Kingian Nonviolence trainer, and has been conducting classes and workshops on nonviolence and social movements for many years.