March 2006

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The ICPJ: Twenty Years of Work for Peace and Justice
by Bill Collinge

It all began in 1985, twenty years ago. Ronald Reagan was President, and in March Mikhail Gorbachev became the General Secretary of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union. As the intensity of the war-making language that prevailed in the early Reagan and late Brezhnev years ebbed, so did the Nuclear Freeze movement in the United States. In Adams County, Elaine Jones, who had been active in the Nuclear Freeze movement, initiated a series of meetings to establish a permanent peace center in the community. The aim, she said, “was to make certain that peace concerns remained front and center in our county no matter what the political climate was.” A Walk for Peace, with send-off speeches by Reverend Robert Koons and Judge John MacPhail, raised funds for the center, and these were supplemented by a grant from the Peace Development Fund.

The Interfaith Center for Peace and Justice was officially incorporated as a non-profit organization on November 7, 1985, and on December 1 it opened its first office in the Codori Building, owned by George Olinger, at 26 North Washington St. in Gettysburg. It obtained 501(c)(3) tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service in September 1987.

The history of the Center divides into two phases, a first, lasting until 1993, in which the Center had an office and paid staff, and a second, lasting from 1993 to the present, in which it has functioned as a purely volunteer group. The Center’s staff were a Coordinator and, starting in 1988, an office manager. The first Coordinator was Sister Sally Tolles, a member of the Daughters of the Holy Spirit, and she was succeeded by Will Lane, Neal Kentch (on an interim basis), and Linda Schmidt. Office managers were, successively, Karen Minnich-Sadler, Mary Kay Turner, and Patti Wise. From its outset, the Center was governed by an elected Board comprising a maximum of fifteen members. We remained in the North Washington St. office until 1991, then moved in turn to 218 Baltimore St. (owned by the Gettysburg Presbyterian Church), 109 York St. (at that time the St. James Lutheran Church Parish House), and 137 South Washington St. (“The Center”). Since 1999, we have had no office space, although since 2004 we have had, thanks to Rosie Bolen, a location in cyberspace: http://www.icpj-gettysburg.org .

The Center’s activities include long-term ongoing activities and special, occasional events, the latter sometimes taking place at the Center’s own initiative and at other times in response to world or local events. One ongoing activity is this newsletter, which has appeared between three and ten times a year for twenty years. Since 2004, it has existed in electronic as well as print form.

Peace Camp

Aside from the newsletter and the annual banquet, the longest-standing ongoing activity is Peace Camp. Peace Camp originated when, in 1988, the Center sponsored Peace Child, a musical play that combined a traveling international cast of children with a large group of locally recruited children. 1988 was in many ways a remarkable year for the Center. A proposal made by the Center provided the structure for the community’s celebration of the 125 th anniversary of the Battle of Gettysburg and the 50 th anniversary of the erection of the Peace Light on the battlefield. The whole series of events was named the Gettysburg Peace Celebration, and its motto, adapted from that of the Peace Light, was “Peace Eternal in a World United.” Peace Child, the Peace Light rededication, and the Gettysburg Peace Symposium were the events in which the Center was the most involved. The first Peace Camp was focused on preparation for Peace Child. About 165 children were involved. From the camp also came the Peace Quilt, which is still in the Center’s possession. The play itself was performed on July 6 and 7, 1988. Prior to that, on July 3, the Peace Child children performed at the rededication of the Peace Light. They arrived at the Peace Light by marching across open fields in near one hundred degree heat. According to the August 1988 ICPJ Newsletter, “The procession of the children crossing the fields dressed in white, carrying flags from around the world, has been cited by more than one observer as the most stirring event of the day.”

Peace Camp continues to the present. It is open to children from kindergarten through sixth grade, and it is held in the mornings of a week in June. Besides the campers themselves, there are many teen and adult volunteers. Themes over the years have included “Peace on Earth: Let It Begin with Me,” “Peace Trek: The Next Generation,” “Friends around the World,” “Sowing Seeds of Peace,” “Practicing Peace through Aikido,” “Cinco Dias de Paz,” “Exploring the Middle East,” and “Feeding a Hungry World.” In 2006, the camp will be held June 26-30, with the theme, “Children of Mother Earth.”

The Adams County Heritage Festival

For fourteen years, the Center has sponsored the Adams County Heritage Festival, a multicultural event that celebrates local ethnic heritages through music, food, arts and crafts, and children’s activities. The idea was developed at a Futures-Invention Retreat that the Center sponsored in 1991, in order to give recognition to heritages that are often overlooked. The first Heritage Festival took place in the Gettysburg Recreation Park on September 6, 1992. Heavy rain compressed the entire event into the Firemen’s Pavilion. Now the Festival fills the Pavilion and a large area of the park surrounding it. Held on the third Sunday of September (which in 2006 will be September 17), it draws more than a thousand people. It includes ethnic food, music, and dance, demonstrations of traditional crafts, children’s games that promote understanding of one another’s cultural heritages, and booths for craft vendors and displays by local non-profit groups.

Peacemaker Awards

In 1995, the Center instituted the Peacemaker Award, to honor people from Adams County who have contributed in a special way to the promotion of peace and justice. In 2005, the Board divided the award into two, one for a Lifetime of Peacemaking, another for achievement in the preceding year. Winners of the award since 1995 have been Will Lane, Jan Powers, Jean Odom, Marjorie Smith, Father Joseph C. Hilbert, Nancy Whitman, Jane and Marty Malone, Dick and Elizabeth Scott, Ernie Simpson, Nancy Forgang, Lou and Pat Hammann, Herman Stuempfle, and Raj Ramanathapillai. Sam Mudd and Suse Greenstone will receive the awards in 2006.

Lectures, Conferences, Youth Programs

The Peacemaker Awards, Peace Camp, the Heritage Festival, and the Annual Banquet are now the focal points of our annual calendar, but over the years, and continuing into the present, the Center has sponsored or cosponsored many different kinds of event. This includes numerous lectures, some with nationally-known speakers, such as Colman McCarthy and William Sloane Coffin, others with local and regional talent. The Center’s activity in sponsoring lectures reached its high point between 1991 and 1996 with the Open Forum lecture series, organized by Marty Malone. The Center also sponsored a book discussion group, chiefly on racial themes, which met from 1992 to 2003, usually in the home of the late Dick and Elizabeth Scott.

The Center has sponsored or cosponsored several conferences and retreats. The highest-profile such event was the 1988 Gettysburg Peace Symposium, in which the Center joined with Gettysburg College, Mount Saint Mary’s College, and Gettysburg Lutheran Seminary to organize a conference subtitled “Economic, Ecological, and Spiritual Approaches to World Peace.” More than three hundred people listened to such speakers as world hunger expert Frances Moore Lappé, ecologist Barry Commoner, and peace studies professor George Lopez. Noel Stookey (“Paul” of Peter, Paul, and Mary) gave an opening concert. In 1989 the Center sponsored a conference, “Strengthening the Roots,” exploring strategies for social change and offering training to peace, environmental, and social justice organizations in the Middle Atlantic region. As already mentioned, a Futures-Invention workshop, titled “Envisioning a Peaceable Community in Adams County,” in 1991 gave rise to the Heritage Festival.

One focus of the Center over the years has been activities for youth, in addition to Peace Camp. 1990 saw the Rainbow Theater project, in which a multicultural cast of high school students wrote and performed a play, “Gonna Raise Myself Up,” on June 8 and 9. The project earlier sponsored a workshop and performance, “Can I Speak for You, Brother?” by actor Phillip Walker, who also advised the student performers in the Rainbow Theater. The Colors of Love Youth Workshop grew out of Peace Camp in 1994 and continued until 2000. Directed by Pam Frankenfield, the group gave dramatic and musical performances on the theme of eliminating racial prejudice. In 1999 the Center sponsored a “Help Increase the Peace” youth retreat, led by Diana Henne and Pam Frankenfield, at the Hashawha Environmental Center, near Westminster, Maryland. Sixteen youth attended.

Responses to World Events

If the Center’s records were all that survived from the period 1985-2005, future archaeologists could still reconstruct a significant amount of the nation’s and world’s history. Besides the activities already mentioned, in 1988 the Center was involved in a vigil at the Peace Light for peace in Nicaragua. Veterans of the vigil still remember how cold it was January 31-February 3 at the Peace Light. The Center co-sponsored an interfaith service in 1990 in response to a planned Ku Klux Klan rally in Kingsdale and later that year was involved in an ecumenical Christian service to commemorate the 45 th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. In response to the first Persian Gulf War in 1990-91, the Center cooperated with others in weekly vigils in Lincoln Square in Gettysburg; it also sponsored a weekly series of lecture-discussions, “Operation Olive Branch,” from January to March, 1991. Since August 2002, ICPJ members have taken part in monthly vigils against the war in Iraq. The vigils, held at the Gettysburg National Military Park, became an official ICPJ activity in 2004. When, on December 26, 2004, a tsunami devastated many parts of South Asia, the ICPJ served as the institutional base for the One Boat at a Time tsunami relief project. $28,508.55 was collected and sent to Trincomalee, Sri Lanka, to build fishing boats for families whose livelihood had been destroyed. The money was sufficient to build and equip seven boats, to be used by twenty-eight families.

The Center has welcomed visitors from all over the world, beginning with the international Peace Child cast in 1988. Later in 1988, local Peace Child cast members performed for a group of visiting Soviet mayors. In 1989, we hosted a touring group of fifteen teen-aged singers and dancers from Latvia, and, in 1991, a group of Soviet Georgian folk dancers. In 2004 we hosted 14 Tibetan and two Canadian participants in a Bike Ride for Tibetan Independence, and in 2005 we hosted about thirty marchers from Footprints for Peace, led by Japanese Buddhist monks, on a walk from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to New York City called the “Stop the Bombs Interfaith Pilgrimage.”

Helping Other Groups

An often-overlooked aspect of the Center’s impact on the local community has been its involvement in starting other local groups that either were distinct from the Center all along or later became so. One example is Project Gettysburg-León, a sister-city project with a city in Nicaragua, founded in 1987. Others include the Adams County Human Relations Council, which the Center took the lead in founding in 1991, and Mediation Services of Adams County, founded in 1995.

Rip van Winkle Awakens

Rip van Winkle’s name does not appear on any extant membership list, but suppose he was a founding member. Suppose he went to sleep late in 1985 and woke up just before the 2005 annual meeting. Perhaps he would be surprised to learn of the end of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall, the Soviet Union. He might be dismayed by all the news of Iraq, terrorism, and “radical Islam.” Perhaps he would be appalled at the housing developments sprawling over the formerly sleepy hollows of Adams County. He might be disappointed not to find a Peace Center office as a local gathering place and shocked to see all the gray hair on those of his ICPJ contemporaries who still have hair. Still, it’s hard to think he wouldn’t be pleased to see Peace Camp and the Heritage Festival, to learn of the tsunami relief collection, and to hear about the flourishing local organizations we helped get started. And then–since sleeping for twenty years is hardly sufficient cause to get one removed from the ICPJ mailing list–he could settle in to the task of reading the close to one hundred issues of this newsletter that would have piled up at his house since he dozed off.

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Last updated March 20, 2006

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