List of visits by Nobel Peace Prize laureates

This is a List of visits by Nobel Peace Prize laureates to the Birmingham District.

This list is incomplete and may never satisfy any subjective standard for completeness. You can help Bhamwiki by expanding it.

List

• Theodore Roosevelt, won the Prize in 1906, "for his successful mediation to end the Russo-Japanese war and for his interest in arbitration, having provided the Hague arbitration court with its very first case." He had visited Birmingham on a speaking tour on October 24, 1905, and returned in 1911 for the 1911 National Child Labor Committee Conference.
• Jane Addams, addressed the 1911 National Child Labor Committee Conference in Birmingham. She won the Prize in 1931 "for her social reform work [and] leading the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom".
• United Nations chief mediator Ralph Bunche, won the prize in 1950 for his role in securing the 1949 Armistice Agreements which ended the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. He visited Birmingham in February 1959 (and was denied a room at the Tutwiler Hotel due to Birmingham's segregation laws.)
• Martin Luther King Jr won the prize in 1964, and was cited as the "first person in the Western world to have shown us that a struggle can be waged without violence." A large part of the success of that struggle was accomplished through the Birmingham Campaign, organized by King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference in coordination with Fred Shuttlesworth's Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights.
• United States Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was awarded the 1973 prize along with Lê Đức Thọ of North Vietnam (who refused the award), "for the 1973 Paris agreement intended to bring about a cease-fire in the Vietnam war and a withdrawal of the American forces". He delivered an address to the Southern Commodity Producers Conference in Birmingham on August 14, 1975.
• Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, won the prize in 1989. The committee state that, "In his struggle for the liberation of Tibet [he] consistently has opposed the use of violence. He has instead advocated peaceful solutions based upon tolerance and mutual respect in order to preserve the historical and cultural heritage of his people." He spent four days in Birmingham in October 2014 as part of Birmingham Human Rights Week.
• Former President Jimmy Carter won the prize in 2002 "for his decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development". He has visited Birmingham several times, including a Habitat for Humanity Greater Birmingham work project in 2010
• Former Vice President Al Gore shared the prize in 2007 with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change".
• President Barack Obama won the prize in 2009 "for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."
• Leymah Gbowee of Liberia won the prize in 2011, along with her countrywoman Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Tawakkul Karman of Yemen, "for their non-violent struggle for the safety of women and for women's rights to full participation in peace-building work". Gbowee spoke for the opening of the UAB Center for Human Rights on September 29, 2016

Several organizations that have had a long-lasting presence in Birmingham have also won the Nobel Prize, including the Red Cross, the American Friends Service Committee of the Society of Friends (Quakers), and the International Labour Organization.

Another Nobel Peace Prize laureate, Cordell Hull, is an alumnus of the Cumberland School of Law, but he graduated before the school relocated from Tennessee to Birmingham.

External links

• Nobel Peace Prize laureates at nobelprize.org