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The International Pfeffer Peace Award or Pfeffer Peace Award is one of the three peace awards presented by the United States Fellowship of Reconciliation (United States) (FOR), along with the Martin Luther King Jr. Award and the Nyack Area Peace Award. Since 1989, it has been awarded annually to "individuals or organizations whose commitment to peace, justice, and reconciliation is recognized as extraordinary." [1]
The International Pfeffer Peace Award was established at the end of the 1980s by Leo and Freda Pfeffer to acknowledge and honour leaders and activists who work globally for peace and justice. Leo Pfeffer (24 December 1910 – 4 June 1993) was the United States' leading theoretician on religious liberty and the separation of church and state, and he argued these constitutional issues before the Supreme Court. Along with his wife Freda Pfeffer (5 September 1911 – 3 November 2013) he founded FOR USA's International Pfeffer Peace Award in 1989, when they also began co-sponsoring FOR USA's National Martin Luther King Jr. Peace Award which was established to recognize persons or groups working in the United States in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. [1] Following Leo's death in 1993, his son Alan Pfeffer took the reins in managing his parents' endowment. [2]
Martin Luther King Jr. was an American Baptist minister, activist, and political philosopher who was one of the most prominent leaders in the civil rights movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968. A black church leader and a son of early civil rights activist and minister Martin Luther King Sr., King advanced civil rights for people of color in the United States through the use of nonviolent resistance and nonviolent civil disobedience against Jim Crow laws and other forms of legalized discrimination.
The Fellowship of Reconciliation is the name used by a number of religious nonviolent organizations, particularly in English-speaking countries. They are linked by affiliation to the International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR).
James Morris Lawson Jr. was an American activist and university professor. He was a leading theoretician and tactician of nonviolence within the Civil Rights Movement. During the 1960s, he served as a mentor to the Nashville Student Movement and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He was expelled from Vanderbilt University for his civil rights activism in 1960, and later served as a pastor in Los Angeles for 25 years.
The Gandhi Peace Award is an award and cash prize presented annually since 1960 by Promoting Enduring Peace to individuals for "contributions made in the promotion of international peace and good will." It is named in honor of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, but has no personal connection to Mohandas Gandhi or his family.
Peace churches are Christian churches, groups or communities advocating Christian pacifism or Biblical nonresistance. The term historic peace churches refers specifically only to three church groups among pacifist churches:
The International Fellowship of Reconciliation (IFOR) is a non-governmental organization founded in 1914 in response to the horrors of war in Europe. Today IFOR counts 71 branches, groups and affiliates in 48 countries on all continents. IFOR members promote nonviolence, human rights and reconciliation through public education efforts, training programs and campaigns. The IFOR International Secretariat in Utrecht, Netherlands facilitates communication among IFOR members, links branches to capacity building resources, provides training in gender-sensitive nonviolence through the Women Peacemakers Program, and helps coordinate international campaigns, delegations and urgent actions. IFOR has ECOSOC status at the United Nations.
The Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park covers about 35 acres (0.14 km2) and includes several sites in Atlanta, Georgia related to the life and work of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Within the park is his boyhood home, and Ebenezer Baptist Church — the church where King was baptized and both he and his father, Martin Luther King Sr., were pastors — as well as, the grave site of King, Jr., and his wife, civil rights activist Coretta Scott King.
John Dear is an American Catholic priest, peace activist, lecturer, and author of 40 books on peace and nonviolence. He has spoken on peace around the world, organized hundreds of demonstrations against war, injustice and nuclear weapons and been arrested 85 times in acts of nonviolent civil disobedience against war, injustice, poverty, nuclear weapons and environmental destruction.
The International Peace Museum is a non-profit, peace museum located on historic Courthouse Square in downtown Dayton, Ohio, United States. The museum's mission is to promote, through education and collaboration, a more equitable, civil, and peaceful world. Its programs and exhibits are non-partisan, secular, and feature themes of conflict resolution, equity, social justice, tolerance, and protecting our natural world. It commemorates the 1995 Dayton Agreement that ended the war in Bosnia. It is "America's only brick-and-mortar peace museum."
Eileen Egan (1912–2000) was an American journalist, Catholic activist, and co-founder of the Catholic peace group American PAX Association and its successor Pax Christi USA, the American branch of Pax Christi.
Hildegard Goss-Mayr is an Austrian nonviolent activist and Christian theologian.
Bernard Lafayette, Jr. is an American civil rights activist and organizer, who was a leader in the Civil Rights Movement. He played a leading role in early organizing of the Selma Voting Rights Movement; was a member of the Nashville Student Movement; and worked closely throughout the 1960s movements with groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the American Friends Service Committee.
Realizing the Dream, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization founded in 2006 by Martin Luther King III to carry on the legacy of his parents, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mrs. Coretta Scott King. Located in Atlanta, Georgia, the organization carries out initiatives on both the domestic and international level. The mission of Realizing the Dream is "To champion freedom, justice, and equality by working to eliminate poverty, build community and foster peace through nonviolence." Two of Realizing the Dream's main projects are the 50 Communities Network, an effort against American poverty, and the Generation II Global Peace Initiative, a peace-building team composed of sons, daughters and grandchildren of leading 20th century activists.
Glenn Smiley was a white civil rights consultant and leader. He closely studied the doctrine of Mahatma Gandhi and became convinced that racism and segregation were most likely to be overcome without the use of violence, and began studying and teaching peaceful tactics. As an employee of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR), he visited Martin Luther King Jr. in Montgomery, Alabama in 1956 during the Montgomery bus boycott where Smiley advised King and his associates on nonviolent tactics, and was able to convince King that nonviolence was a feasible solution to racial tension. Smiley, together with Bayard Rustin and others, helped convince King and his associates that complete nonviolence and nonviolent direct action were the most effective methods and tools to use during protest. After the Civil Rights Movement, Smiley continued to employ nonviolence and worked for several organizations promoting peace in South American countries. Just three years before his 1993 death, Smiley opened the King Center in Los Angeles.
"Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence", also referred as the Riverside Church speech, is an anti–Vietnam War and pro–social justice speech delivered by Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1967, exactly one year before he was assassinated. The major speech at Riverside Church in New York City, followed several interviews and several other public speeches in which King came out against the Vietnam War and the policies that created it. Some, like civil rights leader Ralph Bunche, the NAACP, and the editorial page writers of The Washington Post and The New York Times called the Riverside Church speech a mistake on King's part. The New York Times editorial suggested that conflating the civil rights movement with the Anti-war movement was an oversimplification that did justice to neither, stating that "linking these hard, complex problems will lead not to solutions but to deeper confusion." Others, including James Bevel, King's partner and strategist in the Civil Rights Movement, called it King's most important speech. It was written by activist and historian Vincent Harding.
Charles Coates Walker was an American Quaker activist and trainer for nonviolent direct action in both the civil rights and peace movements. He worked throughout his life to bring segregation, racial injustice, nuclear and biological weapons, and war to public awareness. He used Gandhian methods of nonviolence, writing training materials and organizing marches, vigils, protest demonstrations, conferences and campaigns in different parts of the world.
Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story is a 16-page comic book about Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and the Montgomery bus boycott published in 1957 by the Fellowship of Reconciliation. It advocates the principles of nonviolence and provides a primer on nonviolent resistance.
Mildred Fahrni (1900-1992) was a Canadian pacifist and socialist, who became friends with Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. She was a leader of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) and the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Fahrni actively opposed World War II and the xenophobia that led to Japanese Canadian internment and the internment of Dukhobor children. She was an ardent feminist and social activist.
United States Fellowship of Reconciliation was founded in 1915 by sixty-eight pacifists, including A. J. Muste, Jane Addams and Bishop Paul Jones, and claims to be the "largest, oldest interfaith peace and justice organization in the United States." Norman Thomas, at first skeptical of its program, joined in 1916 and would become the group's president. Its programs and projects involve domestic as well as international issues, and generally emphasize nonviolent alternatives to conflict and the rights of conscience. Unlike the U.K. movements, it is an interfaith body, though its historic roots are in Christianity. Both the FOR in the United States and similarly named organizations in other countries are affiliated with the International Fellowship of Reconciliation.
Sudarshan Kapoor is a professor emeritus, California State University at Fresno, where he taught during several decades. Kapoor is an advocate of non-violence, and an activist practicing Gandhi's philosophy at both the local and national levels. A supporter of the African-American struggle for justice, he also serves as a resource on its story.