Promoting Enduring Peace - Gandhi Peace Award

The Gandhi Peace Award is a certificate, calligraphed with an inscription summing up the work for peace of a distinguished citizen of the world. It is a medallion featuring the profile of Mohandas K. Gandhi, with his words "Love Ever Suffers/Never Revenges Itself" cast in bronze. It is a name on a weighty carved statue of the Mahatma. It is a ceremony held approximately once a year, at which a distinguished peacemaker is recognized and given the opportunity to present a message of challenge and hope. It is to be awarded "for contributions made in the promotion of international peace and good will."

Like all of the perennial activities of Promoting Enduring Peace (PEP), the Gandhi Peace Award was conceived by the organization's founder, Dr. Jerome Davis, in the late nineteen forties. At the Board of Director's meeting on March 13, 1959, he formally proposed that a yearly award be given to persons outstanding in their work for world peace.

A famous New York sculptor, Don Benaron/Katz, was commissioned to create a work of art to serve as the symbol of the Award. He researched Gandhi at the library of the India House in New York City and by 1960 had carved a striking portrait of the founder of the century's international movement for nonviolent change. He wrote, "I carved the Gujarati word for peace on one side, and on the other a symbolic plowshare and pruning hook Đ inspired by Isaiah 2:4":

They shall beat their swords into plowshares;
And their spears into pruning hooks;
Nation shall not lift up sword against nation,
Neither shall they learn war any more.

Excerpted from
In Gandhi's Footsteps: The Gandhi Peace Awards
Š 2002-2006 by James Clement van Pelt.

The 2006 recipient is Leslie Cagan.

Eleanor Roosevelt
The Rev. Dr. Edwin T. Dahlberg
Rabbi Maurice Eisendrath
The Rev. John Haynes Holmes
Dr. Linus C. Pauling
James Paul Warburg
Dr. E. Stanley Jones
A.J. Muste
Norman Thomas
Jerome Davis
The Rev. William Sloane Coffin, Jr.
Dr. Benjamin Spock
Senator Wayne Morse
Dr. Willard Uphaus
U Thant
Dorothy Day
Dr. Daniel Ellsberg
Peter Benenson and
Petretti Ennais

Prof. Roland Bainton
Dr. Helen Caldicott
Dr. Corliss Lamont
Randall Watson Forsberg
Robert Jay Lifton
Dr. Kay Camp
Dr. Bernard Lown
Prof. John Somerville
Cesar Chavez
Marian Wright Edelman
Senator George McGovern
Ramsey Clark
The Rev. Lucius Walker, Jr.
Father Roy Bourgeois
Edith Ballantyne
The New Haven/Leon Sister City Project
Howard and Alice Frazier
Michael True and NEPSA
Dennis Kucinich
Karen Jacob & David Cortright


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