The Gandhi Peace Award is marked by a significant medallion and a certificate with an inscription summing up the work for peace of a distinguished citizen of the world. The medallion features the profile of Mohandas K. Gandhi, with his words "Love Ever Suffers/Never Revenges Itself" cast in bronze. The recipient's name is added to a weighty carved statue of the Mahatma. The Award is presented at 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."
The Award has always been presented in person to each recipient.
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 early nineteen fifties. 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 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 Peace Heroes: The Gandhi Peace Awards © 2002-2010 by James Clement van Pelt.
Past Recipients of the Gandhi Peace Award: 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 Alan Wright and Paula Kline Howard and Alice Frazier Michael True and NEPSA Dennis Kucinich Karen Jacob & David Cortright
