So why didn’t Gandhi get a Peace Prize?

In the midst of the hateration swirling over the selection of President Obama as a Nobel Peace Laureate, commentators are making lists of folks who should have won the medal, but didn’t. Mohandas Gandhi’s name is high on the list, but no one is venturing to speculate why he was never chosen.

Image via Wikipedia

Perhaps because he was a person of color?

Think about it.  Gandhi was a small, dark-skinned man who challenged the British Empire in South Africa and India.  He was a threat  that needed to be eliminated, not a hero who should have been heralded.

In fact, the prize didn’t go to a person of color until 1950, two years after Gandhi’s death.

Ralph Bunche “was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace for his successful mediation of a series of armistice agreements between the (then) 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 African-American and the first person of color in the world to be so honored.

At the time of the presentation he was Professor Harvard University, Cambridge, MA., a Director of the UN Division of Trusteeship, and Acting Mediator in Palestine.”  (information courtesy of the African American Registry.)

Unfortunately, Ralph Bunche and his accomplishments have been forgotten.  So consider this a history lesson.

And it isn’t even February.