Obama, humbled, is third African-American to win Nobel Peace Prize

[Blue_Tires]

i know it isn't breaking news; but a story still belongs in this forum...


While President Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize win may have surprised many Americans, he is not the first winner whose award has been questioned. Furthermore, he is the fourth United States of America president to win a Nobel Peace Prize, but only the third to win the prize while in office. President Obama is also the third African-American to win the honor.

The first African-American president joins fellow presidents Theodore Roosevelt (1906), Woodrow Wilson (1919), and Jimmy Carter (2002) as winners of the prestigious award. Carter was not in office when he won.

The other two African-Americans to win the peace prize were Ralph J. Bunche (1950), who was the first black recipient and was noted for his work with the United Nations, and Martin Luther King, Jr., the renowned Civil Rights activist who took a non-violent approach to protest. King won in 1964.

One of the more recent books on Bunche's life is Ralph Johnson Bunche: Public Intellectual and Nobel Peace Laureate (University of Illinois Press, hardcover, 2008, 216 pgs, $35.00). One review said this book is an "excellent treatment of American intellectual history and Bunche’s contribution to it as a scholar, statesman, and leader."

In 1950 Bunche was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for his successful mediation of a series of armistice agreements between the new nation of Israel and four Arab neighbors, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. ... It was the first, and to date it remains the only, time that all the parties to the Middle East conflict signed armistice agreements with Israel. In being awarded the Peace Prize, Bunche became the first person of color in the world to be so honored. (Other notable contenders for the prize that year included Winston Churchill, Harry S. Truman, Albert Schweitzer and George C. Marshall.) (source: PBS)

When King won the Nobel Peace Prize, he was the youngest person ever to win, and he won largely for his work to end racial segregation. There are shelves of books about King's life as well as books of his speeches and sermons. A well-known classic by King is Strength to Love, first published in 1963.

As the first volume of sermons by an African American preacher widely available to a white audience, Strength to Love was a landmark work. Despite omissions and changes to the original manuscript, Strength to Love remains a concrete testament to King’s lifelong commitment to preach the social gospel. His fusion of Christian teachings and social consciousness remains in print and continues to promote King’s vision of love as a potent social and political force for change, the efficacy of religious faith in surmounting evil, and the vital need for true human integration, or, as he defined it, ‘‘genuine intergroup and interpersonal living’’ (King, 23). This volume brought to the forefront King’s identity as a compelling, well educated, and compassionate preacher at a time when many whites knew him only as a civil rights leader. (Standford University)

http://www.examiner.com/x-10713-AfricanAmerican-Books--Examiner~y2009m10d9-Obama-humbled-is-third-AfricanAmerican-to-win-Nobel-Peace-Prize